Preying
by Excelsior10
Summary: An abduction, an escape, a rescue. A girl with fire in her hair and in her heart, a man with ice in his eyes and in his chest. Broken people see the beauty in letting things burn. "Down Orion comes from the sky." Vicious Species part 1
1. Chapter 1

1-

She liked to look at him. She noticed that they all did, a little, though no one ever said anything. It was rather odd, most times, if a man handsome enough to be considered average on the streets made it into the hospital, it was all the nurses would talk about for weeks. And he was far from the average man on the streets, despite the cuts on his face and split in his lip. He didn't move much, but she watched the way his hair fell, oddly and sharply cut like the rest of him, the flickering of his eyelids, and wondered what went on inside of that head under his dark, dark hair, what was flashing behind his closed eyes. She speculated briefly about what color they were.

"Missy," she said on the second day, while Missy was taking her meticulous time folding his fresh sheets as the two of them stood over him, "who is he?"

Missy scoffed, her brown curls bouncing under her white hat.

"'Oo really don't know 'oo he 'ees?" She tutted, her accent so thick it was a strain for Tessa to understand her. Too many years in America had taken their cultural toll.

"No," she said, looking back down at him. "All my father told me was that I am to ensure his stay is as comfortable as possible. Why? Should I?" If he was the son of some important politician, she would likely have been introduced to him already. But the private hospital wing and general air surrounding his presence meant… something. Meant that he was Someone. She had thought she already knew about most of the Someones in London, especially those her age.

"That's Thomas Shelby, ma'am." Missy's voice had an air torn somewhere between reverence and something like trepidation. She looked like she was afraid to touch him, even though he was completely sedated. Tessa sighed audibly. As nice as he was to look at, she had now been in the hospital for ten hours and counting, managing the endless paperwork her father was now too busy and too important to directly see to himself. And yet this man warranted her father's attention to the extent that he had asked Tessa to keep her eye on him personally.

"Who the fuck is Thomas Shelby?" She grumbled.

It had been a long day, and besides, Missy was unlikely to judge her for swearing. More than anything, though, Tessa rationalized her outburst by reminding herself that they were alone in an entire wing with a single comatose patient, who she glanced back down at out of sheer habit, only to realize after a split second that he was suddenly no longer comatose at all, and was in fact shifting, hands twitching like they wanted to reach for something, head moving side to side groggily. Missy was busy fiddling with something at the end of the bed and did not immediately notice that the man had begun to stir, instead responding to Tessa's rudeness with,

"Oo'd best not let eem catch ya asking that, ma'am. Can't imagine ee'd take kindly to-," but as she was speaking, she looked up from the sheet corner she was folding and at Thomas Shelby's face, and as she looked up, the man's eyes snapped open. Tessa had to firmly resist the impulse to take a step back in surprise. Missy immediately diverted her course of speech.

"Ah, Mr. Shelby, sir, my name ees Missy." She bustled hurriedly over to his side, which was so wrapped in bandages that it looked like he was wearing an oddly cut white shirt. Thomas Shelby was, impossibly and idiotically, trying to sit up, shocking eyes fluttering, but Missy placed a firm hand on his chest, which made him wince. "Oo were involved in an altercation down on Cannon Street, sir, and 'm afraid 'oo were shot twice, sir. Your brotha removed one of the bullets before 'oo got 'ere, but-,"

Tessa felt rather like Missy was unloading a lot of information onto someone who had been shot twice and just woken up from sedation that wasn't supposed to have worn off for another six hours, but Thomas Shelby hardly let the nurse finish a sentence before he spoke in a voice that, even through the haze of drugs, was clearly very accustomed to giving orders, and having those orders adhered to.  
"My brother. Ar-Arthur. Where is Arthur," he ground out through closed teeth. His skin was colorless and his impossible eyes looked unfocused.

"The elder Mr. Shelby es safe, sir. I believe 'e ees currently residing at a hotel with the rest of yer family, should be 'ere within the hour."

The man's fists were clenched in the sheets.

"Oo'd best run and tell yer father, ma'am. 'E'll want ta know Mr. Shelby's awake," Missy said, looking at Tessa, which made Thomas Shelby look at her as well, like a rattlesnake looks at someone who is about to tread on it. It was disconcerting that she found his gaze disconcerting, having spent so many years of her life training herself to no longer fear the weighty gazes of men. He looked at her like he could see right through her, through the doors of the room and out into the corridor beyond. Perhaps that was the morphine in his blood. She found herself nodding, agreeing, leaving the room before she had even processed where it was she was supposed to be going just to get away from those eyes, from that stare. The walk to her father's office was a blur. As the founder of the hospital Tessa was hurrying through, as well as many others, and current Chief Medical Officer of England, his list of titles was long and tendency towards pretension grew along with them. But he was her father. He held an office at the Ignatius Hospital as an act of tribute more than anything else, but as luck would have it, he was spending his day reviewing donations, as he had told her. A decision made immediately after the man named Thomas Shelby had been admitted. "As luck would have it" was right. Tessa did not believe for a second that her father was truly interested in appearing in person for a few measly donations and his presence was instead due to whatever business he had with a man admitted to the hospital for two bullet wounds.

When Tessa arrived, her father was standing at his desk, puffing at his pipe, thick grey hair neatly arranged, one hand tucked into the pocket of his expensive, charcoal colored vest. He turned when she entered and smiled jovially at her after he saw who she was. "Tessa, my dear, how are you?"

"Thomas Shelby is awake." She said, ignoring his pleasantries and sitting with her legs crossed in one of the two chairs at the head of his desk. He sat as well, and tapped out his pipe, but did not respond to her.

"Well? Are you going to finally tell me who he is, or am I meant to make this proposition I know nothing about to a man I also know nothing about?" Her father was silent for several seconds. Finally, he spoke, right as she opened her mouth to prompt him again.

"He is… a predator." He was gazing thoughtfully past her, unlit pipe back in his mouth. Tessa had inherited his grey-green eyes, but the hair was a genetic gift from her mother.

She raised her eyebrows. "A predator."

"Yes. Yes. And to him, we are all sheep." Tessa looked at him. He sighed deeply. "My dear, I'm sorry I have to ask this of you, but I require his assistance. Deeply." He looked off into the distance, through the window that showed the bleak, grey landscape of London outside the hospital walls. "Do assure him that he will be well compensated for his efforts."

Tessa sighed, again, and stood, again, feeling like a carrier pigeon. She rather thought her father was using her to convey his vague message instead of meeting with Shelby himself because he thought he was likely to receive a more favorable response if his request was sent by something with breasts.

"Now?" She asked, a little petulantly.

"Now," Her father said, turning away from her again. She didn't see that his hands were shaking. "Time is of the essence."


	2. Chapter 2

The next time she met him, he was conscious. Which should have been an automatic improvement, but managed not to be, which was really quite an impressive feat. For one thing, nothing had prepared her for those eyes, and she still couldn't handle looking right at them, which was truly bizarre, even for her. She was far from skittish, but her mind told her strange things, sometimes, made her do and say things that she shouldn't and if she wasn't careful, the impulses screamed while logic whispered. For another, every single word out of his mouth just added to the slightly tilted feeling she got when looking at his eyes to make her feel more and more off center until she was sure she was about to fucking topple over right onto the sideways floor. She wished she was sitting down, but the only surface on which to do so was his bed, and she would sooner have chosen the ground.

"Mr. Shelby." He looked up at her slowly, blinked. Twice. Long dark lashes, eyes like shards of ice. It was ridiculous that eyes could even _be _that color, really, especially with the contrast to his complexion, she thought they ought to have the decency to be a nice, straightforward brown instead-

"I'm Tessa Re-," She began.

"I know who you are," He said, his accent rough, still looking at her, and she wished he wouldn't, and she wished he hadn't said that because she had not been expecting it.

"Oh?" She managed.

"Tessa Reilly, only daughter of Leonard Reilly, twenty-five, single." He lingered on the last word. His voice was deeper than what she would have expected. Her palms felt slick. _Predator. _She was silent for a beat, to give him a chance to realize he was being an ass and then perhaps apologize for it. He did not. She cleared her throat.

"Well, since you already seem to know everything there is about me, do you fancy introducing yourself?" She felt grossly unprepared. Uneven. Imbalanced. He ignored her question completely.

"You're American." She looked at him and didn't speak. If he didn't feel the need to respond to her, she could very well do the same. He continued. "How is it that you're American? Your father isn't."

It was becoming ever clearer that he already knew her father. And her father knew him. And had done absolutely nothing to provide her with any of this information. _Many thanks, Leonard_.

"I was raised in America with my mother."

"Mm," he said, and he nodded, still looking at her. His nodding was making her look at how the line of his jaw touched his neck, and she spoke again just to give herself something else to think about because she wasn't stupid enough to convince herself of things that weren't true about a man just because of how he looked.  
"They didn't get on. My mum and dad." Why on _earth _had she just told him that?

"Yes, well, that can happen," he said, like he suddenly wasn't involved in the conversation anymore, or at all interested in it continuing. His hands twitched like they wanted to reach for something again, wanted to move. "You still talk like a Brit."

"I suppose so," she replied, a little surprised that he had said anything else. He had been so dismissive for a moment that she had felt certain he would likely never speak to her, or anyone else for that matter, ever again.

"Mine didn't either."

"What?"

"My parents. They didn't get on." He was back to looking at her. She felt rather like a prize horse, or an animal at the zoo her father had taken her to years ago, or a diamond under an inspector's magnifying glass being checked for its authenticity. Men looked at her often. No one had ever looked at her like this.

"Ah. Well, like you said… it happens." He blinked. Ready to steer away from the odd conversation, she began, "My father, he asked me to-",

"Why single?"

"What?" She said again, sharper. Was he incapable of letting another person finish a sentence?

"Why are _you," _he said slowly, nodding at her, "single? Shouldn't your father have married you off by now?" He looked simultaneously distinctly uncomfortable sat on the crisp white sheets of the bed while also carrying an air of unshakable, indisputable arrogance that only people with faces and reputations like his were capable of possessing. Tessa did not like any of the implications in his words, but especially that there was something so horribly wrong with her that it was inhibiting her father's ability to sell her like a lightly used piece of furniture that no longer matched the decor.

"I would ask why _you _are lying in a hospital bed after being shot twice, but that is becoming rapidly clear to me."

He raised his eyebrows slightly and his expression flickered, but she couldn't tell between what. He shifted in the bed and leaned back with a sigh. His fingers drummed on the mattress with a restless energy. His eyes were so light, so dark.

"Tessa," he said, and she didn't like how he said her name, like he knew her, and somehow she was even more unnerved than she had already been, which at this point was near impossible. "You don't know who I am?"

"My father told me that you're a "predator". That you think of everyone else as sheep." She kept her voice carefully neutral as she said it, studied his reaction to the words. He blew a sharp breath out through his nose like he was amused, but it wasn't a laugh. He didn't reply, was quiet for a few more seconds.

"What do you want?"

She would have _told him _earlier if he hadn't been so quick to interrupt her. She responded in a clipped tone. "My father wishes to meet with you. About business. He said to tell you that you would be more than fairly compensated for your involvement."

"Your father is the CME, isn't that right?"

"Yes," she said, grinding her teeth at his consistent evasion. "He built this hospital. I help him run it, and the others."

"So you're, what? His little fucking messenger?" He waved his hand at her, which looked like it hurt him to do, something that comforted her slightly.

"At least it's a job no one has shot me for."

He looked at her like he had lived seven more lives than she had, and pitied her for it. And envied her for it. She wanted to smack the expression off of his finely carved face.

"Careful, little lamb," he said, and she her temper broke and she spun her eyes and her heels and left the room in the same way she had the previous day, not trying very hard to stop the door from slamming behind her.


	3. Chapter 3

The hospital was quiet at eleven thirty-seven pm. The large grandfather clock ticked, someone coughed in an adjacent room, the pipes of the building creaked. Tommy wanted to scream. He hated silence. Hated the quiet. Hated damn near everything about this hospital. During the war, he had slept while bombs were dropped miles away, while men died next to him, he had slept without knowing if he would ever wake up. He hadn't much cared. When it came down to it, he still didn't. But he had things to build, now. A dynasty. An empire. There was work that needed to get done. He twisted his fists into the starchy white sheets. Closed his eyes. Tick, tick, tick, went the clock. Went the grenade.

The tick tick tick became click click click and within moments of hearing her sharp footsteps approaching, Polly Grey burst through the doors of the corridor into the long and otherwise completely empty room. She was wearing a long black coat whose shoulders were damp from the rain, and a massive hat that hid her face, which was set, her cheeky eyes flat. Tommy knew something was wrong before she had a chance to say "Arthur's done something stupid", and she said it very quickly.

"What, Pol?"

She shook her head, pursed her lips. Prepared herself, not him.

"Polly. Tell me."

She raised her gaze to meet his eyes. "He went after them. To punish the ones who gave the order. The Germans. He was drinking, he was out of his mind-,"

"You mean they know."

She breathed in sharply between her teeth. He wanted his gun. He wanted a cig.

"Yes. They know. Which means they'll be coming." She leaned closer to him on his bed, leaning on her hand on the mattress and making it sink in, which made his side pull and twinge. Where the fuck was his gun? What would a hospital have done with it? It must have still been on him when he was admitted. He couldn't remember any of it. "Tommy. You have to get out of here."

He nodded. He knew. He wasn't really listening. Come on now, Tom, time to go.

"Are you armed?" He asked her.

"No," She said, and the briefest flashes of panic were beginning to leak through her dark eyes. "There's already men parked outside. Watching." Parked outside. Out front. He needed to find another exit. He needed to find someone who would know one.

"Can you find a way?" Polly was saying, and he almost smiled.

"Polly," he said, "you should know better than anyone I can find a way out of anything."

It was meant to reassure her, but when he pulled the sheets back and shoulder screamed and popped and he stood up from that god forsaken bed and ignored the feeling of new blood dampening his bandages. "Now go on. Get out of here. They might recognize your car."

"Where are you going?" She asked him, pleading that he would tell her, that it would somehow ease the thumping of her heart.

"To try to find a girl who hates me," he called back, his voice casual, even.

Polly watched him stride towards the still-open doors, shoulder held at an awkward angle, no shirt or shoes, stooped to the side he was favoring, all lines and sharp edges and mussed, dark hair, and she begged to whatever or whoever was listening that he had spent the last few minutes being Tommy Shelby even through the pain and the drugs and that he somehow had a plan, and dear, sweet Jesus that it was a fucking good one.

Tessa was at the hospital because she had fallen asleep. In her father's office, waiting for him to arrive. He never did. It was unlike him to forget their appointment, which was the only reason she had remained for so long, sure that he would show the moment she decided to leave. Her face had been planted firmly against the solid oak of his desk, and she had to peel her cheek off its surface when she woke with a start to the silent room. Where am I was closely followed by bloody hell what time is it as she rose quickly. At this point, it was evident that her father had forgotten, or been held up, but the bottom line was that he was not likely making their nine o'clock. She stumbled a bit down the hall after locking the office door behind her, giving a small smile to a passing night nurse who was carrying an armful of laundry. She had only turned another two corners before someone called her name so loudly she almost screamed.

"Tessa! Miss Tessa!"

"Missy! Jesus Christ, I nearly pissed myself. What's wrong?"

Missy had two curls falling in front of her eyes. "It's Mr. Shelby, ma'am, ee's gone!"  
"Gone? What do you mean, gone?" He wasn't due to be discharged for another two weeks, at the earliest.

"Just disappeared! I was only wondering if 'oo'd seen him!"

"I haven't, no, I'm sorry. Speaking of missing men, have you seen my father?"

Missy shook her head. The curls bounced. "Not since this morning, ma'am. I'll tell eem you was looking for eem if I see eem, though."

"Okay. Thank you, Missy. Good luck finding that asshole."

Missy gave her a small smile, and Tessa turned back around. After only a few more echoing steps down the hallway's deserted corridors, she was once again intercepted, this time with a hand slapped over her mouth as she was yanked into what, in the dim lighting, she thought was probably a storage closet. The hand muffled her yelp. It smelled like smoke. A deep voice said "Don't. Scream," before she could place a good kick to the kidnapper's legs.

She knew that voice.  
"I can't very well scream with your hand on my mouth, can I?" She said, reaching up to drag it off. Her heart was pumping so fast it felt like it was skipping beats after two shocks in under a minute, and in the low glow of the gaslamps in the hallway through the closet's open door, Tommy Shelby's cheekbones looked like they would slice the hand of anyone who slapped him, which she told herself was the singular reason she didn't. That, and he was grabbing her right wrist in a deathgrip.

"That was the idea."

"What the fuck are you doing?"

He was breathing hard. He still wasn't wearing a shirt, just his garment of bandages, which were blossoming red. Black tattoos peaked out from underneath them on his chest and arms and his black hair was tousled from having spent several days in the hospital bed. Black and red.

"I need you to get me out of here," He said, like that was a reasonable thing to ask, to just fucking say, with no explanation even if there was one that could justify it, which Tessa was seriously doubting.  
"You- what? Are you delusional? Are you having delusions?" She was tempted to touch his forehead to measure his temperature but wasn't stupid enough to try to touch him without warning. His grip on her arm felt like a vice and he was really standing quite close to her, closer than she thought was entirely necessary, and it was making the insanity of his request even more difficult for her to process. And he kept looking at her.

"I'm not delusional." Despite his quick breathing, his voice was low and even. "I have to leave. Now."

"Okay, then fucking leave, I won't try to stop you," She said, trying to wiggle her wrist away from him, which didn't work.

"Tessa. You don't understand." He was very close to her. She thought this was probably a technique he used, in other scenarios. In this scenario, however, it could also be because he seemed to be having a hard time standing upright on his own. Bullet to the gut. Bullet to the shoulder. It figured. "They're coming for me, they know I'm here. They'll be here any minute. You have to get me out."

She didn't even bother asking who "they" were.

"You want me to aid in the rescue of a gangster." She said it because now was the only moment she thought she could get away with it, the only when maybe he might be desperate enough to tell her the truth. She didn't know why she wanted to hear him say it. He didn't look desperate. He looked at her absolutely silently, absolutely cold, absolutely unbothered by the quickly approaching threat to his life. And hers, probably, if she agreed to help him. Would she risk getting shot at just so that her father could have his precious business deal, just so one more bad man's eyes could stay open a little longer? The eyes in question were drilling through her in the dark, and she kept flicking her gaze back up to his despite knowing that doing so was dangerous, that every time she did she found she cared less and less about stupid things like self preservation. His head was tilted a little to the side, like he was waiting for her, waiting for her to say yes, like he knew that she would, like he knew before she even did, he just had to give her some time to get there on her own. His hand felt like it could snap her wrist with one sharp twist. Her eyes shifted to his face again and his lashes were catching what little light was shining in through the cracked door to his left, like butterfly legs. The closet was musty and something being stored in the cubbies on the wall was pressing sharply into her back. And he was absolutely enrapturing to her, in that moment, in all the good and bad ways, broken bones and butterfly legs. God, what the fuck, she thought.

"Fine. I'll do it. If you agree to work with my father." She raised her chin and stared back at him with all the defiance she could muster. "And if you fucking let go of me."

"I don't make deals without knowing what is is I'm agreeing to." His voice was quiet, every syllable precise. Lovely. His jaw was set.  
"Let's just say its worth your life. Come on. We need to go." She began to move past him.

"Wait," his hand was still on her wrist, holding her back, tight. Hers were warm from her rushing blood. His were cool. For one insane moment she wanted to put his hand on her forehead, to take some of the heat, instead of the other way around, but his mouth kept moving as he spoke and she forced herself to focus. "What's your plan?"

"I'm getting you out of the hospital, remember? Jesus, how much morphine did they give you?"

"No," he said, dangerous but still so completely, bafflingly calm, which only served to make the danger worse. For a moment, she almost pitied whoever it was that was after him. "Your plan for once we get out."

"What, there's more?"

"Do you have a car?" He said, insistent, ignoring her.

"No."

"Do you have a horse?"

She hesitated. For too long.

"Good. I'll need your horse." She glared at him. "Also, I need a gun."


	4. Chapter 4

For all the talking she did, Tessa moved quietly through the dark hallways of the hospital. Her breathing was so erratic he could see it through the movement of her slight shoulders, but she was controlling it so that it made no sound. This was a surprise, but one that he was exceptionally grateful for. He was almost completely reliant on her and her decisions for the moment, a position he was horrendously unfamiliar and uncomfortable with, but one that was marginally better than being on the receiving end of more German bullets. None of the Germans had made it out of their last encounter alive, so there was no way for reports of Tommy's injuries to make it back to their leadership. That was, there had been no way until Arthur went on his fucking revenge spiral and essentially told them that Tommy was nearly incapacitated and ripe for the picking. Off. The picking off. And now they were coming to finish what they had started on Cannon Street. Fucking Arthur and his fucking conceptions of loyalty. A soldier should be better at controlling his emotions. Better at critical thinking, at strategy, at knowing what information your enemy could use against you. They could have gone back and taken the whole German organization out together after Tommy had been released if he had really needed some brotherly bonding, but instead, here he was, tiptoeing through a hospital, with no shoes and no fucking gun, with only a girl who came up to his chin and probably an entire armed German milita at his heels. All because Arthur couldn't do as he was damn well told. Tessa's voice brought him back to the present moment, and he pressed his good hand to his side and it came away red. He felt dizzy, out of touch, like he was watching what was happening from behind a plane of glass and pain.

"I have a plan, but you're not going to like it," Tessa was saying, quietly, close to him. If he had a pence for every time he had heard that one.

"What?"

"Take this. Follow me."

She held out a little bottle, in long, slender fingers, retrieved from her dress or pocket or out of thin air. He knew those bottles. He took it.

"How much?"

"All of it," She called, from over her shoulder. She was fiddling with something on the wall. Tommy opened the bottle, shook the powder onto the back of his hand, used his other hand to close his left nostril, and sniffed hard. Closed his eyes and shook his head. The snow was fucking pure.

"Is that-," He asked, but while forming the rest of the sentence the drugs hit, and he couldn't hear his own voice over the rushing of blood in his ears. He couldn't hear hers either, but he could see her gesturing wildly and her mouth moving. Her red hair was whipping around her like flames. Sounds came back in, slowly like waves, and the first one he heard was the clicking of approaching boots on the tile.

"Shelby! Now's the time! Get the fuck in the chute!" She hissed, shoving him with all her weight.

The chute was, of course, what she had been fiddling with in the wall. A supply chute for making the transport of goods easier between levels, something you wouldn't notice unless you worked at the hospital. Or unless your father had been the one that built it.

A nearly vertical chute with two bullet wounds. If anything was impeding it right now, he would likely get stuck and be fucked. If he fell over twenty or thirty feet directly down, he could land on his wounds and be fucked. The footsteps were becoming muffled voices. Tessa was shaking, eyes wide, trying to physically push him into the cramped hole.

"Don't," he said, pointing a finger at her, "fucking call me Shelby."

And he in he jumped.

The men rounded the corner just as the top of Tommy's dark head disappeared down into the blackness. To cover up the noise his body made sliding down a shaft meant for medicine and laundry, Tessa did something very stupid. She called out to them.

"Evening, gentlemen. Out for a nice midnight stroll through the hospital?"

The man in front, the tallest, was very blonde. He looked at her the way men did, and smiled slowly. He said something in German to the shorter man on his left, who chuckled. There were three of them. Three guns. Three sets of hands. Three large bodies. Moonlight was trickling down from the outside sky through a nearby window in the corridor, giving the whole scene an odd, flat kind of dimension.

"We are looking for someone. Perhaps you could point us to the room." He said, forming his words like he was rolling hard candy over in his mouth. She hated him within an instant.

"We are here to offer our condolences," said the shorter. His hair was brown. His jacket bulged out under his arm where his pistol hung. "For his condition."

"I'm sorry, I don't know any of the patients. I'm only here looking for my father," Tessa said, as innocently as she could, while a drop of sweat rolled down her back. She could feel it tickling her like a shiver.

"Ah, well. That is unfortunate." Another long, slow, sweeping look. Up and down. "Perhaps there are other things you might assist me with," the large blonde said, taking a step forward. His companion on the right, the last of the three, halted him with a hand on his upper arm.

Called him "Romanoff", said something in German, probably about orders. She distinctly heard "Shelby". So these were the men that were after him. A German gang. Of course. She was suddenly less concerned for their sake and much, much more worried for Tommy's. _I need a gun, _he had said. They had three. She felt faint. Romanoff shook off his companion brusquely, with a look of contempt.

"Thomas Shelby is a sitting duck. Where can he go? I like to enjoy my missions." He took several more long strides towards her, until he could reach out and take her chin in his hand. He turned it from side to side, his hand so large it covered nearly her whole face. Tessa was staring at his holster. She could get to it before he did if he moved his arm up. And if his companions shot her for it, so be it. She would rather die than what was likely to come next anyway. She knew it with a cold, apathetic certainty. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears.

"What's your name, my dear?" His fingers were squishing her cheeks.

"Missy," She said.

"Mmm. You are quite lovely, Missy. Much too lovely to waste." His left hand was moving to her thigh.

"Wait. Romanoff." The brown one was looking at her intensely, but for a different reason. "What is your family name? Answer me."

"I-," She couldn't think fast enough. The brown haired one swore.

"That could be Leonard Reilly's daughter, you fucking idiot, we need to-"

Romanoff moved his hand suddenly from her face to her neck, lifting her so hard her heels left the ground. She was reaching with her hands, her airway was closed, she couldn't reach his gun, she couldn't breathe-

"I don't care about leverage over some old fucker-," Romanoff's spittle hit her cheek as he spat his words but there was a loud, loud _BANG_ from several stories below.

Romanoff dropped her. "What the fuck was that?" The other men shook their heads, trading glances. "Fuck. Shelby." He said something else Tessa couldn't understand. Gestured with his right hand. His arm moved up. "The fuck are you waiting for? Fucking go!"

The men ran. Romanoff slapped Tessa with the back of his raised hand, so hard her head ricocheted off the stone wall. A ring on his finger sliced open a cut on her cheek, but she could only tell because she could feel the blood run. The side of her face burned like it had been a fire that had hit her, instead of a hand.

"Stupid whore," Romanoff mumbled, before chasing after the other men. Tessa took one gasping, shuddering breath, waited until she was sure they had turned the corner, and threw herself blindly down into the darkness of the chute.


	5. Chapter 5

Thomas was still at the bottom, in a room that looked like a place where patients might be prepped for surgery, or maybe have the actual surgery. His dark silhouette wholeheartedly shocked her as she clambered to her feet after the drop down the chute, but her heart was still in her throat from the slide and she had no more surprised screams left in her for the night. She had thought he would be long gone by now. She had landed on her ankle wrong. He was holding a scalpel, spinning it between his fingers and leaning against something that could have been an operating table, looking like he could have stood up against all three of the armed men upstairs armed with only his tiny little knife. He did not ask if she was okay.

"Yep, time to go," He said instead, grabbing her wrist and pulling. She had had enough of men touching her. She had had enough of helping some insane bastard get back on the streets just so that he could inevitably hurt more people. She yanked her wrist out of his grip, and probably only succeeded because he hadn't been expecting her resistance.

"What the fuck are you doing?" He hissed at her. "We need to _go, _they're coming down here-,"

The adrenaline made her feel like she was floating. Like she was still being lifted off her feet. Her vision was swimming.

"Fuck," Tommy swore, but he moved towards her slowly, unthreateningly. "Look. Look at me." She didn't want to. She wanted to look up at the sky, because thats where she was going, she was floating away, "Tessa, I need you to look at me, eh?"

And then she looked at him and his eyes then she _was_ looking at the sky and his voice was like water. He talked like every word he said was a fact, an absolution, a commandment. They were. She looked at him, feeling half awake, kept looking at him. His eyes were intense, leaving no room for fear, his voice hard, leaving no room for debate. "Those men are coming down here right now. They will kill us if they find us. You need to keep it together. You need to get us out of here." She wished she hadn't let him have all of her cocaine.

She dug her nails into her palms until they cut into her skin. Breathed out through her nose twice. Her feet had settled back down onto the ground. Her mind as well. "There's a back door."

Tommy held up a hand, gestured, "After you."

She turned and nearly impaled herself tripping over a sideways steel dolley. "Fucking- did you knock this over?"  
"Yes," Thomas said, clearly at the end of his rope, brushing past her to the other side of the room in the direction she had been moving before she stopped.

"Did you fucking knock it over on purpose?"

"Yes," he said again, firmly, like she was the idiot in this situation, and one that he did not have time for.

"Are you _insane?_" She whisper-screamed. "Why would you do that?! That's how they knew where you are!"

"They were going to kill you."

"They were not going to kill me-,"

"Alright, if you can't find another time to argue with me about this I'm going to fucking knock you out and leave you here," Tommy said, grabbing another scaplel from a nearby table so that he was weilding one in both fists. The moonlight slanting in from the one high window glinted off the metal, off his eyes.

"Thomas," she said, because she had suddenly remembered something, something she couldn't believe that she had for even a second forgotten, her voice as mundane like they were at a bookshop talking about the rainy weather. She held up her right hand. It was holding Romanoff's gun. Thomas Shelby's face lit up like a child seeing the presents under the tree on Christmas morning. He looked so different when he smiled, it crinkled his eyes but didn't meet them. Still sharp. Eyes like blades. A smile like a scalpel. She still handed him the gun, trading him for one of the little silver knives.

The back door of the hospital was really an entrance for the cooks through the basement kitchen, heavy and oak and Tessa couldn't get it to budge because she was shaking and Tommy had to slam his good shoulder against it but it creaked open and let them into the cobblestone alley beyond so at least the cocaine was doing enough to keep him on his feet. He couldn't even feel his side or his shoulder, but the hospital's stone walls felt intricately detailed under his fingertips. The full moon was much too bright for his liking, and when he peered around the corner he saw three shiny black cars parked right at the front of the hospital's front steps. The London night was missing the heavy coating of Birmingham coal that clouded the air, and it smelled sharp like metal and the tainted water of the Thames. A clock in the distance chimed twelve times and for every strike he whispered "fuck" under his breath, head falling back against the stone. Tessa had her palms pressed against her eyes despite the scalpel clutched between two fingers of her right hand, still shaking, silent. She had gotten them out. It was his turn.

"Where's the horse?" He asked her, trying to ground her.

"My father's stable. Two miles north."

"Okay. Can you walk?"

She nodded, like there was any alternative, and dropped her hands, balling them into fists at her sides. The knife stuck out between her fingers. They walked as quickly as possible without being innocuous, without running, which is what Tommy wanted to do. He wanted to sprint. He wanted to run and ride and drive but her legs were shorter and her breaths were still coming in gasps and he could see that her neck was red even in the light of the moon. The men in the hospital had shaken her. She was a rich girl, likely not used to being roughed up. Not used to being touched without permission.

"What if someone sees us?" She asked, after a few silent minutes. Her long hair was tangled from the drop down the chute, her expensive dress dirtied, and there was a cut on her cheek that was bleeding steadily down her neck and onto her collar. He felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. Opened the chamber to see six shiny bullets. Spun them. Cocked the hammer, uncocked it. Comfort. Safety. Let them fucking come for him.

"I have an idea."

"You and your fucking ideas," she said, under her breath, holding her arms in her opposite hands like she could keep herself together.

"You're one to talk." He was walking faster than her. He let her catch up, restraining himself from taking out his frustration at being held back by her presence on her and her shorter legs. "How the fuck did you get this off of him?" He lifted the gun.

"Men think with their cocks, not their brains." She paused. "It probably means they'll know I'm with you, now."

"Mm. Worth the trade."  
"Yeah. For you, maybe."

"For you too." She didn't respond.

"Hey," He stopped her. Held her arms in his hands and forced her to look directly at him. "Once tonight is over, my men will take care of everything. I owe you a debt. I'll stay true to my word." He could feel her shaking in his hands. "And trust me, you might well end up being very glad you got me a gun." She did not look like she believed him, and he couldn't quite blame her. She stared at him. Shook her head. It made a few more drops of blood drip down her smooth cheek.

"Very comforting," she said, spinning around and walking away, hobbling a little on her weak ankle. He let her take the lead, kept the gun out.


	6. Chapter 6

After fifteen minutes at a brisk pace that made his side and shoulder throb, they heard a car approaching. It was inevitable, and still potentially harmless, but they both tensed like Medusa had struck. Tommy put one finger on the trigger and another on his lips. Tessa nodded like she knew what she was agreeing to. The car was moving at them slowly down the cobbled street. Too slowly. Tommy didn't like it. Coming home late means you're in a hurry to get there. People driving slowly late at night meant they were looking for something. Or someone. Or two someones. The heavy night air slipped in and out of his lungs and his vision slipped in and out of focus but his hand didn't shake. Tessa moved closer to him, perhaps subconsciously. He put his hand back and moved her behind him, and for once she let him. The car was turning onto the street, the noise of its engine rumbling off the side of the buildings, mostly houses. Tommy swore and turned to Tessa, whose eyes were wide and wild.

"Do not fucking fight me right now," he said, and then he lifted her up and slammed her against him.

"Oof," Tessa said, inelegantly, as their chests knocked together. He was leaning up against something, holding her under the backs of her thighs with her legs wrapped around him so that she didn't fall off. She felt rather like a koala, and the only time she could remember being in this position there were quite a few less clothes-

"_What_ are you _doing," _she hissed, and she wanted to think it was the danger that was making her head spin, but she was thinking a lot of inappropriate and inopportune and just generally unhelpful things, like that she wanted to lick the sweat from the slope of his neck and see if his lips were as soft as they looked and he was burying his face in her neck and his hand in her hair and it was so shocking that there were still things in the world that felt good after the night she had had that she didn't sigh but she would've had to try hard not to otherwise. _What insane kind of fever dream am I having _Tessa thought and then Tommy said in her ear "Make it convincing," in a voice low and deep and pressed his mouth to her neck as the car swung around the corner in perfect view of their spot in the shadows where the streetlamps didn't shine but the bright moon couldn't quite give up on. He smelled like smoke and she wanted him, despite the black car, despite the German gang, despite that he was an arrogant bastard, despite the razor blades. Or perhaps because of all of those things, a little bit. The moment his lips touched her neck, his mouth soft and warm, there was a clenching low in her belly and the sound she made _was_ quite convincing because she was quite convinced. The car was slowing. She wondered if she could hear the _cli-click _of rifles being loaded, or if she was imagining things. Maybe she was imagining all of it. Tommy's fingers were tensed on the underside of her thighs, ten pressure points because his gamble meant he had to set the gun down on the box behind him, head ducked down so that the passengers couldn't identify him. His fingers tangled in her hair and he breathed out slowly, across her neck sending shivers down her spine, hips moved slowly, his head was tucked against her collarbone and she wanted to thread her fingers through his hair and pull but she didn't and bit her lip and braced her hand against the wall in front of her instead, rough under her palm. Her other hand was clutching her scalpel and she was holding it so tightly it sliced her two last fingers. The car's headlights swung past, illuminating them for one dazzling, blinding moment, then kept moving. Blissfully, shockingly, thankfully kept driving. Tommy held her there for a second, completely immobile, and their breathing was ragged like they really had been fucking. His body felt hard against her, like the brick wall, like a punch to the face, but his breath was warm and his mouth had felt so, so good. Too good. Tessa's head was spinning like a top. She thought she might want to scream. He then quite abruptly muttered, "Fucking hell," and let go of her all at once. She was about to chastise him for not giving a girl some warning when she saw him clutching his side, darkness seeping through his fingers, the knuckles of which were still split from whatever altercation had caused his other wounds. Right. The bullets. The entire reason for the hospital. Out of which they had just been chased by a German mafia. Which was, in all likelihood, still following them. She breathed out long and slow and tried to make it even. What a fucking night. God, she wanted a cigarette.

He wanted a cigarette. He could still smell her, like he was breathing her in, like she was all over his tongue like good whiskey, even though he was putting as much distance between them as logic allowed, lengthening his stride until she was falling behind, and he could hear the clicking of her heels behind him, a little uneven because of the ankle she was favoring. Fucking Germans. Fucking drunk brothers. Fucking crazy, bullshit, fucked-up situation. Once this night was over, he was putting Arthur's head through a wall. And probably buying her a car. He was worried about cars. He was worried about the car that had just passed them in particular, because he had a feeling it was doing rounds in proximity to the hospital, and if whoever was driving it didn't know to be on the lookout for a couple rather than one man, they would undoubtedly be altered to the change soon. If he saw it again, he would know. If he saw it again, he would shoot. No hesitation.

She wasn't talking. He was glad. The drugs had worn off and breathing felt like inhaling shrapnel. Every step he took his body complained of being a mistake. His lungs didn't want to inflate and when they did it made him cough which made the bleeding and the stabbing fucking pain worse. He wanted a cigarette and whiskey and enough opium to make him sleep for three days.

He breathed in deeply to try to get more air into his lungs and had to stop halfway through so that he didn't pass out from the pain. He changed his mind about talking.

"What's your horses' name?" He asked her.

She didn't look at him. Her pretty eyes trained on the ground. He had stopped on the pretense of letting her catch up, but was really pressing his knuckles to the hole in his side to try and stop some of the bleeding. The pain was everywhere. It could take over everything, if he let it. He could not allow that to happen. She passed him, sparing him the quickest glance. She wasn't shaking anymore, but she was nervously fiddling with the knife in her hands like she didn't know what it was doing there. Tommy had tucked his into the waistband of his black pants, because his storage options for weapons was sadly limited at the moment.  
"Sunchaser. Chase." Her soft waves went all the way down her back, stopping just above the spot where her silk dress fanned out. She had more shape than the girls he was used to seeing at the Garrison. A stabbing wave of pain shocked through his shoulder and he gritted his teeth.

"Good name." His breathing was not quite regular, but she would not notice.

"Good horse," she said, and he focused on the way her hips swayed when she walked. Back and forth. Back and forth.

In the distance he heard tires on the road. She saw him listening, suddenly alert, and her head snapped around so that she could listen to.

"Hide," he told her, cocking the gun, and she hesitated. And then she did.

They were almost to the edge of the city, where the houses became larger and farther apart until the estates and the farmland took over. Tessa was crouched behind some bushes, which was not nearly a solid enough defensible position but there was little he could do about that now, and he went to wait behind the large stone pillars set on the edge of the bridge they had just crossed, finger on the trigger, breathing in, breathing out. The same black car was creeping closer, ever closer, and he just caught a glimpse of the driver and the passenger holding a long shiny dark barrel when he lifted the German's pistol, aimed and shot twice, once between the eyes of the passenger, and once right above the heart of the driver. The shots rang out, rang in his ears, kept ringing and ringing, like the steel beams of the bridge had collapsed, and the car, no longer piloted, swerved off the road and into the ditch directly next to the brushes Tessa was behind, hands and dress in the mud. He shouted at her, but she was already moving, throwing herself out of the vehicle's way. The black paint of the vehicle was shiny in the night like moonlight on water and as it careened it made an awful sound too, a groaning, hissing noise when it crumpled against the dirt. Tommy stalked over to it, steam spilling out from under the hood like cigarette smoke, before the two suspended wheels had even stopped turning, still barefoot, his steps silent but purposeful on the paved ground. He did not lower the gun. He did not give himself a moment to recover, to wait for the shots to stop ringing in his ears, for the wheels of the car to stop spinning. Those moments don't exist. The driver, whose chest was already covered in steadily pumping blood, was slumped over the wheel. Tommy reached in, grabbed his lapels and shook him, slapped him to get him to focus. He was wearing a German uniform. He was vaguely aware of Tessa in the background, in the dirt where she had landed, but hardly. This feeling was familiar. Not comfortable. Not safe. Never safe. But simple, straightforward. This was war, and he knew all about war. The man had a generic sort of face, but Tommy knew he would remember it. He remembered all of them.

"I'll give you a choice," he said quietly, like he was conducting a business deal. War is the greatest business of all. "You tell me who you're working for, I can kill you right now. You don't, or you try to fucking lie to me, and I start taking fingers, let you bleed out nice and slow." The man laughed. Blood bubbled out of his mouth.

"Fuck you." More blood came with his words.  
"Yeah. You see, that," Tommy said, shaking his head, slipping the scalpel from his waistband and holding down the pointer finger of the man's right hand, "that was a poor choice." As he started to slice, he heard the telltale metallic slither of a gun, and looked up to see the barrel of the long dark rifle moving towards him in the man's other hand, moving to point between his eyes, and for a millisecond he could see right down it, into the darkness, into what he knew he deserved-,

"TOMMY," Tessa screeched from somewhere behind him, and something silver flew right past his shoulder, slicing the man's ear. The gun went off, went down, and shot a hole through the side of the cab, right next to Tommy's knee. Tommy lifted the pistol under the man's chin and fired for a third time, before the man could so much as put a hand up to his bleeding ear where Tessa's scalpel had shorn it off. The shot was so loud in the confines of the car that it deafened Tommy, and he hoped to fucking christ it wouldn't be permanent. Plenty of soldiers had lost hearing in one or both their ears from shooting off in too restricted of an area. Think about that. Think about what you have to do. Don't think about the gun. Don't think about the killing, or the dying, or the death. He closed his eyes, breathed once, twice, opened his eyes again, ducked out of the car and slammed the door shut behind him. He was drenched in blood. The German's, and his own. It was in his mouth. In his eyes. He spat it onto the side of the road.

"Go check the trunk and see if they have any petrol," he called to Tessa, who he couldn't see but could hear moving to the back of the car. So he could hear her footsteps. That was a good sign. He told himself it was good, anyway. He did not like the sound of spending the rest of his life with only the voices in his head to keep him company. He gritted his teeth and pulled the car door open again, dug around in the dead man's pockets until he found cigarettes and a light. He did not look at his face, but it was too late. It was always too late. Tessa appeared by his side, holding two cans. He could see the lights of the stars and the full moon reflecting off her eyes in the dark.

"Drench it," he told her, taking one of the cans from her and pulling the stopper loose. Everything smelled like petrol and everything tasted like copper. And it all felt like France.

She covered the car silently, obediently. Her dress was ruined, its light green silk in tatters. He lit a cig, puffed it, closed his eyes. He took another pull, let it wash over him. Clear his mind. Then he breathed it out, grey smoke that went swirling against the black night sky, and Tessa backed up without him telling her to. He flicked his lit smoke at the car, and up it went.

Against the flames he looked like a reaper. She wondered if maybe he was death, if maybe he was a demon, a god, if maybe he was the devil. The fire cast shadows that looked like they were meant to be there, like they were a part of him. Blood soaked his skin and was splashed across his face, all red, and the cut of his jaw and his cheeks and the dark stock of his hair was all black, and when he lifted and lit another cigarette the orange glow at the end lit up his eyes as he breathed it in and through the night they still pierced her and they were so so blue. She felt like she was looking into the fire while she watched him, like she could gaze into the flames forever and they would stare right back when he looked at her. He said nothing and neither did she and when, after a few moments of him smoking like they weren't watching two bodies burn, he turned to leave, she followed.


	7. Chapter 7

The entrance to the Reilly estate was a twelve foot wrought iron gate made of two rearing stallions, but Tessa did not take them to the entrance. It was a night of back alleys and secret doors, and so she led them over a fence and across the pastures. The fence caught her dress and sliced it up above her knee, but it was already in such shambles that it hardly mattered anyway. They looked like fleeing prisoners, or refugees, or souls that had crawled out of hell, and Tommy was stumbling and coughing and Tessa kept moving forward blindly, in a daze, her mind completely empty. She had forgotten about her ankle. In comparison, even if she had remembered, it would seem so trivial she could have hardly convinced herself to care. None of this was real. She would wake up tomorrow from this horrifying, insane nightmare and never have it again. The thought calmed her. Everything felt like a dream, anyway. The breeze sifted through the leaves of the massive trees on the edge of the pasture and the night was cool on her hot skin and as they rose up over a hill the huge house came into view, lying in the distance at the edge of the woods. She started descending downwards, on the sloping lawn, towards the lake and the stables, through the carefully manicured grass, Tommy trailing behind. She wondered if she should be helping him somehow, but she wondered it blankly, as if knowing even as she thought it that he wouldn't let her. He stopped suddenly when they reached the edge of the stream that cut through the fields of the property and flowed into the lake near the house. He lit another cigarette, stood motionless for a moment, then waded in, not bothering to remove his pants or his soaking red bandages, smoke drifting after him, and she stood at the bank, watching him move into the waist deep water. He was bathed in moonlight and water and blood, and he looked deadly, and he looked graceful, his features all shadows and edges, and he looked like the answer to all prayers, for danger and for everything else. She looked down at her hands, covered in dirt and mud and blood, and wondered if she had ever been so physically unclean in the past decade. Her face and ankle burned suddenly. Her arms didn't look like her own arms, her hands didn't feel like her own hands. He was looking up at the sky, his head tilted all the way back, looking like he had just been baptized in blood. Someone smarter than her, maybe, would have turned around and left him there. Tried to never think about him again, told her father she wanted no part in whatever business he had with a murdering gangster. His head was tilted back, his closely cut hair gleaming dully in the moonlight, smoke drifting out between his lips. Anyone who knew what was good for them would turn around and leave and never look back. But she sighed, unlaced her shoes and peeled off her socks and ruined dress, and joined him.

Her hair was so long it was trailing in the water by the time she reached him, standing in the middle of the stream and letting the current swirl around her. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed, and he watched as she approached him. She looked how he felt, but he probably looked worse. He sank under the water and the sharp cold spread through him and struck his bones and his wounds like a thousand little bullets, making his brain buzz, and the moon was so bright and glowing in the sky that when he came back up he could see the water carrying the blood off him and washing it downstream, little trails of red. He kept the hand holding the cigarette above the water and used the other to scrub his arms and his face and his chest. He hated being dirty. Ever since the tunnels, he had hated it. He hated the blood, and the death, and the fire. It all followed him. His side and shoulder ached, everything ached, and he wanted to lie down under the water and never come back up. He held the cigarette out to her and she took it with a "thank you," and he wanted to laugh because of how absurd it was that she should be fucking thanking him. She took a long drag and released it with a long breath. Her underthings were clinging to her, and he looked at her, letting his eyes trail down her body and drink it in. She was beautifully shaped, small but well proportioned, with lovely breasts whose nipples he could see showing through the clinging white fabric. He thought about having her against him in the alley, the sound she had made. She took another deep pull, and he watched her lips wrap around the cigarette, and she flicked the ashes into the water. He took a step closer to her, put his hand up, knuckles brushing her red-smeared cheek. Her skin was so smooth, velvet like a horse's nose. Her almond eyes closed, lids fluttering like trapped wings.

"You're bleeding," he said, like he was noticing for the first time, so that he had an excuse, and she responded with a quiet "hmm".

Her body was thrumming and still all at once, like a hummingbird at rest. She understood them. They must get so tired. She was so tired. So tired she felt like she never needed to sleep again, so tired she was no longer tired at all anymore. She could hear his breaths over the quiet sound of the water, the current swirling around her hips and tugging gently at her remaining clothes, and she opened her eyes because she wanted to see his, to live in this one moment, even if it turned out it wasn't actually real after all. They stood there, breathing together, his hand against her face, soft and gentle. He had just killed two men with those hands. The gun was on the bank with her clothes, and she felt like her soul had been uncovered too, just like her, ripped out and laid bare somehow, in the swirling color of his eyes. He was looking at her, and it was worse than it had been in the hospital, when she had known his danger only because of instinct rather than terrifying, intimate experience. She had seen his face when he raised the gun, when he pulled the trigger. Not even the recoil had made him flinch. She wondered how many times he had done that, how many times it took for you to do that before you lift, point, shoot, like a reflex. His eyes looked like precious stones, sapphires and diamonds and opalite. His hair was wet and dripping gently down his face, their trails detailing the lines, and he was easily the most beautiful man, he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, one hundred times over and over again. How unfair the world was to create something so beautiful only for it to exist to destroy. Does the deer appreciate the lion before it is torn to shreds? His hand was smooth and cool against her skin. She was no deer. She was no sheep. But she would still let herself be his prey. She took the last drag of the cigarette and let him cup her face and her cut stung and when she breathed the smoke out it was into his lungs and she had never, until that moment, been alive.

He tasted like blood and smelled like smoke and petrol but his mouth was so soft and warm and wet and she let him part her lips with his and they felt even better than they looked, and she felt dizzy like her head had been _snipped _right off her neck, like she had just breathed in twice her weight in white powder, and the rest of her body was buzzing and numb and the cigarette burned her fingers because she had forgotten she was holding it. He pulled back, slowly, and she dropped her forehead and rested it against his chest, felt it rise and fall, felt his heart beat. He took her hand in his larger one and led her out of the stream, and she put her ruined dress back on, sticking to her wet body, and they walked through the grass pasture to the stables, and neither said a word.


	8. Chapter 8

"So where is it, then?" Tommy asked, gazing into the large, handsome, and unoccupied stall with _SUNCHASER _carved into the gleaming wood.

"It's a he, and he's in pasture. He doesn't like being in the stables at night." Tommy lit another one of the dead man's cigarettes.

"Stay here," she told him, and he looked at up and at her, with his piercing expression, leaning his good shoulder against the wooden wall like he owned the stable and all the horses in it, cigarette in his mouth. She went around the corner and through the open wooden sliding doors, and called to her horse. He was in the nearest enclosure, a small grass paddock, and he was trotting over to her before she had even spoken, whether because he had heard her or smelled her, she did not know. He was always waiting for her before she arrived.

"Hi, baby," she cooed, and he snorted, rustling his mane. His tail swished, his ears pricked forward. "I missed you, too." She patted his strong neck, kissed his soft nose. "There's someone I want you to meet, yeah? And don't worry, if he's rude to you, you have my absolute permission to kick him in the balls."

She opened the gate and clicked to him. He walked out, hooves _clopping _on the cobblestones, and put his face down at her shoulder, nickering. Her heart swelled. Only Chase knew her completely. Only Chase loved her unconditionally. She walked back into the stable wordlessly, and he followed, graceful head held high and large nostrils flaring when he caught Tommy's strange scent on the wind. He needed no lead with her. She had spent many lonely years training him, having him follow her around the ring, then the pasture, then the barn. It was slightly warmer inside the stable, which she was grateful for. The damp clothes were making her feel shaky and clammy, or maybe that was just a symptom of the night.

"He can smell you, and you still smell like blood, so don't-," She said as she entered the stable, with Chase trailing a bit behind her, and she was going to say "come any closer", but of course Tommy was already approaching her stallion, who had halted in the doorway.

"So this is the horse, eh. Sunchaser." He said as he moved past her. Chase was eyeing him warily. He moved his ears back. Tommy held a hand out, low, palm up.

"Yes," Tessa said, and she couldn't help the spark of pride.

"And what a horse," Tommy said softly, still moving slowly closer to him. He started speaking words Tessa couldn't catch, but it didn't sound like English, or even the French they had made her take at school. Chase's ears swiveled as he listened. She didn't know he spoke another language. She didn't know he was good with horses. All she really knew about him was the color of his eyes and that he could kill a man without flinching. .

"He doesn't usually like men. Or the smell of blood."

Tommy said "Mm," bending over to check one of Chase's hooves. "He was in the war, and he doesn't want to compete for his mother's attention."

"So you can read horses' minds now, as well as people?" She asked. Tommy didn't respond. He was patting Chase's flank, still speaking quietly in those strange words, voice low and deep, and she noticed with slight irritation was that her horse was quickly cooling his normally fiery temper. Traitor.

"He was in the war," She admitted, sitting down on a bale of hay and looking down at her hands in her lap, pale even against the pale green of her dress, "but not for long. His last owner sold him off to teach a lesson to his son when he was caught beating him. He was bred for the races. He was meant to run in the Derby." She cocked her head and looked at her baby. "My father found him in France and brought him home to me as a birthday present. I was fourteen years old and he was two." Chase's head was low, calm. Tommy scratched behind his ear.

"He's big for an Arab. Full blood?"

"Yes," she said. His chestnut coat gleamed. The white blaze down the center of his face shone in the light like it glowed in the dark, as did his four white stockings. "My father told me Chase reminded him of me. Same hair. Same temper."

Tommy responded, but he was speaking to the horse, and in another language.

"You need new bandages," she said. "Don't move."

Tommy said nothing, to her, at least, still having his conversation with Chase, who snorted again.

When she returned to the stables she was carrying an armful of bandages, her father's clothes, blankets, and a bottle of whiskey. The head maid said she hadn't seen any sign of Tessa's father, and she was beginning to worry. It wasn't like him to be out all night without telling her. Although she admitted to herself that it was rather fortuitous that he was out tonight, because she had no idea how she would have explained to him that they were harboring a fugitive in one of their stalls like some kind of fucked up version of Christ's birth. Tommy was sitting on the stable floor with his head back and his eyes closed when she walked back in, cigarette in hand. Chase was munching on the hay scattered on the floor. She was suddenly so exhausted she could hardly stand, especially on her twisted, throbbing ankle. The sun would likely be up in a little over an hour but for now it was the darkest part of the night, as the moon set and the stars blinked out in the velvet sky over the trees. The stable smelled comforting and familiar, like stained wood and leather and hay. The man in the stables, however, was neither of those things. Being around him made her pulse jump, made her body feel like everything was happening faster and slower all at once. She pressed the bottle to Tommy's hand and his eyes fluttered open, cracked open and the ocean spilled out, his hair spilling over his forehead like dark ink. He took one drink, then two, then puffed his cigarette. The whiskey left his lips wet and she wanted to suck it off of them. She cleared her throat to clear her head and crouched down next to him, the proximity only serving to make things worse. _Get yourself together, Tessa. _

"Sit up," she told him, and began carefully unwrapping the blood and water soaked bandage that crossed over his chest and under his arm. The bullet hole underneath was steadily leaking red, all the stitches torn. His skin was smooth and she stopped herself from touching more of it, from tracing his tattoos with her fingers. She wanted to know what they meant, why he had gotten them.

"Give me the bottle," she told him, and he took another swig before handing it to her. She doused the wound and he grunted in pain, grabbing the torn herm of her damp dress in reflex. Chase nickered.

"Easy. Breathe. Breathe," she told him, and he did, sharply, face tilted up and jawline and profile in sharp relief. She slapped herself mentally, again, because she had a job to do and he was a gangster and had fucking been shot, twice, for christ's sake, and wrapped the new bandages. Her father was a doctor, after all. The wound in his torso was worse. When she sanitized it, or attempted to and hoped the whiskey would do, he hissed, and made a sharp noise that she silenced immediately, without stopping to think, by pressing her mouth against his.

"The maids can't know you're here," she said against his full lips, and she felt him relax a little, and then felt him pull her closer just as she was about to move away, the metallic taste of his mouth sharp on her tongue. Whiskey and blood and smoke. He was intoxicating. She felt drunk.

"Fuck the maids. Fuck the Germans. I've got a gun," He said in between kisses, his mouth a bed of pillows she wanted to dive in.

"Its you and your gun against an entire fucking army, Thomas," she told him, trying to focus as his lips moved to her neck.

"Mmm," he rumbled against her, and she had to restrain herself from sliding into his lap despite the exposed bullet wound. "So be it."

She trailed her fingers along the back of his head and threaded them into his hair like she had wanted to the first time she set eyes on him. It was soft like silk. Every time his lips touched her neck, new shivers raced down the backs of her thighs. He grew impatient, reached out and lifted her onto him, but she caught his hands in hers and leaned back, careful to avoid his shoulder and side, which still needed care. He looked at her, eyebrows raised slightly, eyes so sharp she forgot how to breathe. A challenge. An expectation. The cold, calculated, empty empty empty blue. He slid a hand along her thigh, confident, competent, his fingers strong against her skin, pressing against her leg like someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Tommy always seemed to know exactly what he was doing. She didn't know what the fuck she was doing, ever, at all, but especially now.

"It could help."

His words reverberated, but the meaning took a second to hit home. So that's how he dealt with it, with all of it. She wondered how much there was. She saw the burning car behind her eyes when she blinked like it was imprinted on her irises. She ignored the feeling of him underneath her. She scoffed quietly.

"Sure, Tommy. Sure it could."

He dropped his hand, brought his cigarette up and breathed it. "Have you ever seen a man die before today?"

His voice rumbled through his chest, and through her. She could feel it. She stared over his shoulder at the patterns in the wood grain of the stall wall when she answered. Her skirt of her destroyed dress was draped over the floor and over Tommy's legs like a worn battle flag.

"Yes. My grandfather. My mother. I wasn't there when my brother died, but it's mostly the same."

He didn't answer. He smoked. She was still on his lap and could feel him looking at her. His eyes were magnets, pulling. It was almost intimate, almost, but his face was closed, like she was sharing secrets with the wall. If he was surprised, he did nothing to show it.

"You did well," he told her. She gave him a sardonic smile, but it fell off her face half way. Bastard. As if that was the kind of thing you told someone to make them feel better after a night like this. Fuck her, then clap her on the back and tell her good job for not throwing up when she watched two men die. That was the Tommy Shelby remedy, it seemed. She stood up.

"Chase doesn't take a saddle or bit, so I hope you're a good rider. If you hurt my horse on the way to Birmingham, I'll fucking cut you in your sleep." She turned to look at him, and the beautiful, terrible apathy. "And you owe me some cocaine." He could finish his own damn bandages. Her hands were covered in his blood.


	9. Chapter 9

The next day when he woke up in the straw he wished he hadn't. His body hurt as badly as it had when he had first come to after being shot. Worse, even. Blurry memories of the night before came together into a collage, sharpened into a picture, then a thousand different snapshots. Tessa's voice desperately screeching his name, blood splattered on white bandages, his bare feet on black roads. He needed to figure out what to do about the fucking Germans. He needed to figure out who their leader was, how to get to him, what he wanted. He rolled painfully upright in the straw and lit a cigarette. Everything smelled like leather and the musky, earthy scent of horses. Something rustled outside of the stable, and Tommy decided that if he was about to get shot, he would just let it happen, because he was too tired to try to stop it. But it was only Chase's crimson head that appeared around the corner, nose to the floor, nostrils flaring, searching for stray hay. He scratched his nose against his forelock, and looked at Tommy with bright, intelligent eyes. The stable was beautiful in the light. Shiny dark wood, at least twelve massive stalls, only a few of which were occupied. The stallion was more impressive in the day as well, his body trim and muscled, sixteen hands of gleaming Arabian spirit. Tommy prefered Fresians, Andalusians, gypsy horses. Less prone to spooking or temperament issues. But Arabians were bred for endurance, and there was a long, hard day ahead for both of them. Tommy stood, and refused to wince as he did so, as if he was afraid of the horse's judgement.

"Alright, Sunchaser. Let's hope your mother keeps you in good form," He told the horse.

There was a pile of clothes Tessa had left for him, lying beside his makeshift straw bed. A large coat, a large shirt, and a larger hat. It would have to do for camouflage, for now. She had even remembered a holster. He tucked the gun into in, slipped the coat on, took a few pulls of whiskey. The horse was watching him, his eyes large and liquid, his lines sloping and graceful. _They really do have the same color of hair. _He wondered if she was up at the house. What she would do if he knocked on the door. He dropped his cigarette and stomped it out with boots two sizes too big for him, and started talking to a horse about a journey.

When he made it to Birmingham twenty three hours later, both he and Chase were lathered in sweat. The horse was trained to respond to movement rather than the simple reins, so he turned when Tommy turned, walked where Tommy looked, sped up, slowed down, stopped whenever he gave a squeeze or a tap or a word. It was less like riding a horse and more like driving a car. The gypsies trained their horses this way, and the Arabs, and the American Indians. But never had he ridden one that could read his mind. Which was good, because thinking was about all he was capable of for now. He found himself talking to the horse during the journey, half delirious, half English, half Romani, the pain in his side and his upper shoulder stabbing him but keeping him conscious. The sun was blinding, but the clouds were worse, the night was too too too quiet, just the sounds of Chase's hooves and his own harsh breathing. Time felt odd and viscous, stretching like melted glass. People he passed in towns and on streets stared at the odd, hunched man in the ill fitting clothes huddled on the fine firey horse, but no one stopped him, no one accosted him. What luck. He thought about Tessa desperately flinging the scalpel right as the German had raised the gun. What luck. He kept his thumb on the pistol the whole way. He was focusing entirely on staying upright on the horse, or if not upright, at least staying on. He was sweating and delirious and the worst part was knowing it, and not being capable of doing a thing about it. Maybe he really could read horses' minds. Maybe Chase could read his, because by some miracle, the horse seemed to know where it was Tommy needed to go. By the time Small Heath came into Tommy's swimming vision, he was making a fifty-fifty mental bet on whether he was actually there or if he was just imagining the coal and the dust and the grey, familiar streets. Now people were shouting at him, recognizing him, running ahead to warn the family. Ada's white face was the first he saw emerge from the crowd, and he slipped off the horse, stumbling and clutching his side. This kind of public display of frailty was bad for his image, bad for the family reputation.

"Tommy? Tommy!" She ran to him, checking his face, his shoulder, his torso, seeing the blood and the bandages but no new wounds. Her eyes were shining. "Where the fuck have you been? They said you got out of the hospital and no-one's seen you since, and- where the fuck did you get this horse?"

"It's a long, long story, Ada. A very long story. Now, if you wouldn't mind, I need to-," The street swayed, and darkened, and rose up to meet him, and Thomas Shelby passed out in his sisters arms on the crowded road.

Two days later, when Tommy woke up, it was to see his older brother pacing anxiously by his bedside. He was wearing an expression like a dog that knew it was going to be punished for digging up the family garden.

Tommy didn't speak for a moment. Just breathed. Kept his eyes closed. _Easy. Breathe. _Her voice floated back to him. He grabbed the gun with three bullets lying on the bedside table and leveled it at Arthur.

"Hey now, easy, Tom. I was just doin what I thought was right, wasn't I? Couldn't live with knowing they'd get away with what they'd done now, could I?"

"What they'd _done?" _Tommy asked, quiet, cold. His head felt like it weighed ten tones. "For fucks sake, Arthur, we fucking killed them! We killed the ones who did it. And now the whole gang is after us, because of what you done!"

Tommy dropped the gun back onto the table with a loud clatter. Arthur now looked like the dog after it had been kicked.

"Fuck," Tommy said. He ran a hand over his face. "I need ten extra men stationed at all of our posts. I need you and John to go to the German pubs, find out who the leader of the gang is. Organize a meeting. Carry a white flag when you go in but keep guns under your hats in case things go south. And Arthur? Tell Polly to open the safe."

Arthur stuck his chin out, nodded twice. "Yes. Yeah." And the work began.

Three days later, he was sitting in the back room of the Garrison, papers strewn in front of him, chain smoking and trying to make connections. There was something he wasn't seeing. Something larger at play. A barkeep entered the room, nervously, fidgeting with the rag slung over his shoulder. He was young, and new. Arthur had hired him to try and appeal to the upcoming generation, he had said. Tommy thought that was bullshit. The Garrison had alcohol, and that was appeal enough.

"What?" Tommy prompted, looking up, after the man had stood for several seconds without saying anything.

"Excuse me, sir, I'm sorry, sir, but a man came in just now, said his name was Charlie, said someone was at your house looking for you, sir. Said to come and tell you."

"Who was at my house?"

"I- I don't know, sir. A woman, he said."

Tommy nodded slowly, put his cigarette out, and piled the papers. _Of course._ He was rather surprised it had taken this long. He doubted she would ever have wanted to see him again, had he not still been in possession of her horse. "Don't let anyone in this room until I return. You understand?"

The man bobbed his head.

"Good." Tommy stood.

"One more thing, sir, so sorry to trouble you. Charlie said, seeing as you weren't home, and that you were always making people sit around and wait for you, he said that, sir, not me, that he would take pity on the poor lass and just send her here. To you." The man said all of this very quickly and without taking a breath.

"Take pity on her. Of fucking course he did." Tommy sighed. "Go clear the pub."

"O-of course, sir." The man turned on his heel. Tommy checked his watch. Quarter past three. He grunted when he stood, but only because he knew he was alone. He walked slowly to the front room, whose double doors were swinging closed as the last patrons exited by the time he leaned on the bar. The afternoon light shone golden through the frosted windows.

"Shall I go too, sir?" The nervous man asked him. Tommy tossed him a shilling. "For your missing wages," he said, and the man nodded again, pocketed the coin, put down his rag and left. The pub was quiet, aside from the noise outside that trickled faintly in. Machinery and voices. Tommy waited. When she arrived, she was alone. He had rather expected her to be.

"I might have to keep your horse," he told her, flicking his lighter open and burning a new smoke. She walked slowly into the bar, eyes dancing around the room. Grey-green eyes, dark and blown. The color of pounds. Hair like melted metals dripping down her back and shoulders.

"I already took him back. Spoke to a man named Charlie, told him you stole the horse from me and I had come to reclaim him. He believed me. Not sure what that says about you." She stopped her visual tour of the pub and looked at him instead.

"Not sure what that says about Charlie. All it takes is a pretty face," he said, and he smirked a little, testing. Her dress was a dark navy blue velvet with white lace. Anyone who had been to Small Heath would have known better than to wear white lace unless they wanted it to turn grey. Tommy walked behind the bar.

"You want a drink?"

She sat down on a stool across from him, crossed her legs. Her loose hair fell down over her shoulder in thick waves and she reached up to move it behind her shoulders.

"Is this the trick you do? Clear out a whole pub, pour the girl a drink, make her feel special?" Her half American accent caught on the last word. He leaned across the bar. There were freckles across her nose, he had been wrong before, in the dark. Straight nose, lips like petals. "Sweetheart, I don't need to use tricks."

She looked at him, perfectly manicured eyebrows raised in a challenge, then tilted her head. She smelled sweet and crisp, like apples. Diamonds glittered on her ears, her wrists, her neck, throwing glittering spots of light against her perfect skin. "No, I don't suppose you do."

"I own the pub, anyway."  
'You own it?"

"Yep." He took out a glass, poured himself some amber whiskey. "Well, me brother does, but I bought it for him."

She looked around again, her gaze suddenly much more critical.

He leaned back. "So if you have your horse and you don't want a drink, why are you here?"

She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth, sighed quickly. The cut on her cheek was dark, as were the ring of bruises around her neck. There were circles under her eyes like someone had dipped their thumbs in ink and pressed them there. He felt a distant flash of hatred for whoever had done this to her, and then a stronger one when he remembered it had been him.

"I lied. Don't have my horse yet, technically. Charlie told me he had to go and fetch him from your stables, but wouldn't tell me where that was, which makes me think you hide things there." Tommy didn't reply, just looked at her, waiting. She hesitated.

"My father is missing," she said, like a piece of china that was breaking. "The last time he was seen was the day we left the hospital. I need your help," she met his eyes, "finding the people that took him."


	10. Chapter 10

He looked at her, told her the truth, unflinching. It wasn't up to him whether or not she could handle it.

"I already know who took him."

"You what?" He poured himself two fingers of Irish, drank them. She was looking at him like he'd just shot her.

"It was the Germans. Same gang that shot up my brother and me. They're getting involved in Brit politics somehow, something about a revolution. Maybe another war. I think your father," he pointed his empty glass at her, "found out."

"That's why he wanted your protection." Her voice was small.

"What?"

"That thing he wanted that you agreed to do if I got you out of the hospital. I think it was protection. From the Peaky Blinders." Her hands shook on top of the gilded gold of the bar. So she knew their name now. "Do you have vodka?"

He poured her half a glass, she threw her head back and tossed it down. It rang against the bar as she set it back down and she hissed through her teeth.

"Vodka, eh?" He asked.

"I'm being forced to branch out," she told him, but her eyes looked far away. "Whiskey makes me sick now."

He poured himself some more. "Funny," he said. "Whiskey is what stops my sickness."

He drove her to the yard, opened her door. She ignored his outreached hand as she climbed down, holding her dress up in her dainty hands, and he scoffed. Her perfume wafted past him, the only good smelling thing in the whole damn city. Charlie was waiting for them, standing near an enclosed trailer hooked to a truck that proclaimed _Shelby Company Limited_ in flowing script. Chase was tethered to the trailer and was being brushed down by Curly, who was chattering excitedly.

"Hello again, Miss Tessa. And Mr. Horse Thief, sir."

"Charlie," Tommy cleared his throat. He had one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette. He looked so different than how she had grown accustomed to seeing him, wearing expensive clothes instead of bloody bandages, holding a smoke instead of a scalpel or a gun. A businessman instead of a runaway. His hat hid part of his face and his long black coat hung off his shoulders. She realized she was staring when he noticed her gaze on him, and she jerked her eyes away.

"He's a beauty, ma'am, really. Beautiful. Beautiful. Prettiest horse I ever seen, I think," Curly was chittering. She smiled at him. Tommy was still watching her, she could feel it like a pressure in her head.

"Thank you. I would offer to let you ride him, but he's got a bit of a temper, I'm afraid. That's what you give up for good looks."

"Ah, 's alright. This one's the same way," Charlie said, gesturing at Tommy, who fastened him with a sharp glare, smoke furling out of his mouth. Charlie stopped smiling. "Anyway, we'll have him hitched up in no time, if you want to give Curly your address, I'll have him drive the horse down tonight."

"Much obliged, thank you." She gave him another smile, mostly at Tommy's expense, and went over to Chase, checking his hooves and talking to Curly as he finished rubbing him down.

Charlie sidled over to Tommy, who was still watching Tessa, cigarette between his lips. "Well," he said, testing the waters, Tommy could tell. "Like horse like owner, eh?"

Tommy didn't respond, or look over. He took another drag.

"Tommy," Charlie said, his tone low. "What happened to her face, mate? Her neck? That have anything to do with you?"

Tommy dropped the finished smoke, ground it under his heel. "Don't take the horse to the Reilly estate. Take it back to my stables. Tell Curly."

He strode over to where the horse, Curly, and Tessa were gathered, breeze from the cut blowing ash around his feet and flapping his coat in the wind. Tessa had her cheek pressed to her horse's neck. Chase was breathing softly, his head lowered, making her hair flutter with the wind.

"I think the reason your mother is single is because there's no room for another man in her life, next to you," Tommy told the stallion in Romani. Chase looked at him with a bright brown eye.

"What language is that?" Tessa asked, brushing the horse's flank, not turning around.

"Gypsy," He said, then cleared his throat.

"Oh." The wind blew her hair against Chase's nose, and he snorted loudly, and she laughed quietly. Tommy looked at her, silent, for another moment.

"Come on. The boys'll take care of your horse. It's time to go." She let him help her back into the car.

"You should be taking me home," she told him. He didn't reply.

"You're not," she stated. The passing streets of the unfamiliar city were growing dark.

"Tessa" He parked the car outside of a line of townhouses, elegant and upper class. He reached into his pocket, drew out his cigarette case. When he looked at her, his eyes were serious. They were always varying levels of serious. She had never seen him smile except when she had handed him the gun. She thought of her father, and her heart ached. "You can't go home."

She broke her gaze with him and stared ahead, out the window of the car. That was what she was afraid he would say. "Tell me you're going to help me find my father."

"I will," Tommy sighed, ran a hand down his face, "but not tonight. I have my men gathering intelligence as we speak. We have coppers on our payroll, members of congress in our pocket. They'll report back to me tomorrow. But it isn't safe for you out there."

"And you expect me to believe you suddenly give a fuck about my safety?"

"Tessa, will you-,"

"Where's my horse, Thomas," she said, and his jaw worked back and forth.

"I can't tell you. You'd probably try to leave."

She didn't argue. "So I'm being kidnapped by the man who is supposed to help me find kidnappers." Tommy managed to convey a shrug with his eyes. She breathed in sharply and stared at the vines climbing up the perfect bricks of the houses.

"Takes one to know one. Consider yourself lucky."

She whipped around to glare at him again. _Lucky?_

"Jesus," he ran a hand down his face. "Just get inside, will you?"

She slammed the door of the expensive, black, shiny car behind her, and when she closed her eyes she saw Tommy standing in front of another black car, this one burning, his eyes crackling like blue flame. Gangster, soldier, predator. She opened her eyes again and hesitated before she followed him as he walked up to the houses' steps, because she really didn't have an alternative, thinking about how his pretty clothes just made it easier for him to carry a gun. Pretty and deadly, like a puma, like a falcon, like a shark. The entryway of the house was dark, and it smelled like smoke, but like smoke from a campfire in the woods, like pine and sap and cold air. She doubted he was here much. Or alone, when he was. The thought bothered her a little, and excited her a little too, and she repressed both reactions and wanted her snow. When he passed her to light a lamp in the hall she could smell him too, and instead of blood and petrol he smelled like cigarettes and clean cologne. Footsteps descended from stairs hidden in shadows and a maid appeared, an older white woman with brown hair. She reminded Tessa a bit of Missy.

"Hello, Mr. Shelby. We weren't sure if you would be returning this evening."

Where did he spend most of his nights, Tessa wondered. Bars? Alleys? Finding whatever he could that would "help"? Probably not at church.

"Ah, hello, Ellanor, this is Miss Reilly. She will be our guest for the evening, please see to it that she has everything she needs."

_I am in a gangster's house. My father is missing. I was almost killed this week. I saw two men die. _

Tommy's cheekbones were thrown into relief by the lamp on the wall, his sharp jaw shadowed. A cigarette occupied a permanent position between his open lips. Tessa pushed herself against his chest, forced him to look down and meet her eyes.

"Find me some vodka. And don't you dare make your maids fetch it for you."

His smoke followed her as she climbed up the shadowy stairs and turned at random into one of the many rooms. As she did, she heard Ellanor say in a quiet tone, "I see you've got yourself a little firecracker, haven't you, Mr. Shelby?"

And she heard Tommy's tired sigh.


	11. Chapter 11

Tessa's hair floated out like river reeds around her. Bubbles flew to the surface of the water out of her nose. Ellanor had drawn her a bath. It was both helping, and it was not. It was helping enough to make her admit she was being petulant, and that he had agreed to help her, probably because of the promise of her father's payment, but admitting that forced her to focus on other things, and that did not help at all. _I am in a gangster's house. My father is missing. I was almost killed this week. I saw two men die. I helped burn their bodies. _Her heart felt like it hadn't beat in a normal rhythm for days. She had hardly slept, her nerves frayed and brain running on fear and cocaine, pacing around and around.

There was a knock at the door. She rose up out of the water.

"Come in," she said, expecting Ellanor, but it was Tommy, and he was holding out two crystal glasses and a bottle of vodka in the most apologetic gesture she assumed she was likely to ever see from him. He had shed his coat and suit jacket and was wearing his undershirt and vest. She was wearing nothing but bubbles, though, so she had him beat, she supposed. She stared at him, blinked twice, and said, "Fine", sinking down into the water again until it came up to her chin. He gave a tiny, almost nonexistent smirk, the closest thing she ever got to a real smile, and entered. She sighed exasperatedly when he stood at a small standing table, facing her, completely shameless, pouring them both a drink. Her fingers were starting to prune. She crossed her legs under the water and her arms in front of her chest.

"What?" He said, when she raised her eyebrows and gestured at him with one hand. His eyes were so blue, even across the room. She tried to ignore it. His undershirt was a light blue, too, she noticed. _A hardcore gangster who matches his shirts with his eyes. _She huffed.

"Could you close your eyes or turn around or something for a moment, please?"

He made a face that so directly translated to, "If that's what you want," that he might as well have just said it out loud, and she hated how pretty he was when he made it, but he did as she asked, hands clasped behind his back, and she rose, grabbed a robe that Ellanor had left folded on the nearby canopy bed, and wrung her hair out into the still-steaming tub.

"You may turn around now, but only if you're handing me a glass while you do it," Tessa said, but of course he was one step ahead of her, and he handed her a cup of shimmering crystal with two inches of vodka before lowering himself into one of the room's red velvet covered seats, legs crossed, arm resting over it's back. She would never have thought his house would be so lavish. She wondered if he chose it all himself. She doubted he had the time.

"So what is it that a gangster does, exactly?"

"I don't like that word," Tommy said, swirling his vodka and then knocking back his glass.

"Then don't be one."

He stared at her. She shrugged, then looked down and drank to have something to do under his scrutiny. She crossed her legs and caught him watching her exposed calf and thigh, and the hunger in his eyes sent heat through her that had nothing to do with the hot bath.

"I fix races. I sell weapons." He rattled items off his list apathetically, gesturing vaguely with his glass, like he was reciting a daily mantra that had lost all meaning years ago. "I transport illegal goods, drugs, alcohol, whatever needs moving. I offer protection. And I hurt my enemies." He stared at her past the end of his unlit cigarette, brushing it gently against his lips, which made her look at his pretty mouth. She jerked her eyes up, but he was still watching, and suddenly she didn't know where to put her eyes. She wanted drugs, desperately. Mercifully, he broke the contact to fetch his light, and after a moment, she reached for it from him and took a pull. It hit her head like a swarm of pleasantly buzzing bees. "I also build orphanages and schools and give a considerable amount to charity, but no one ever seems to focus on that part."

Tessa took another puff. Shrugged a little. Her mouth tasted like him now. "They should. I think it evens out. All money is eventually blood money, doesn't matter where it comes from, only what it does."

Tommy was judging her. She could feel it, and wanted to confront him about it, but wasn't sure she wanted to hear what he would say, and knew he would be nothing but honest. She wasn't feeling steady enough for his honesty. He leaned forward, took his cigarette back and pointed at her with it. "Why does a high class girl like you walk around with a bottle in her pocket with enough snow to fix a horse for three races?"

She looked back at him. His shell-shocked eyes. "Money can't buy you a ticket out of tragedy."

"Won't know until I try, will I?" There was almost a note of something in his voice. Regret, sadness. Almost.

She nodded. "You won't know until you try." She stood up. Finished her drink. Poured another. "Close your eyes."

He did, this time, without any complaints. She pulled a nightgown over her head, squeezed some more water out of her still-dripping hair. She walked over to him, leaned down, watched his face with his shut eyes when he couldn't watch her back, like she used to at the hospital. He lifted his cigarette and took a hit, keeping his eyes closed. When he breathes out, it tickled her face. She could see the blue veins in his eyelids, reflecting what was underneath, the faint white scars on his face. She leaned in and kissed him, and he put his hand on the back of her neck, a wonderful pressure, trying to coax her further, deeper. But she pulled back. His eyes stayed closed for a second, then fluttered open, cracked like a geode. She thought they every time he did that, a new universe was probably born somewhere. And when she thought that, she realized something, and then she thought, _fuck. _

He kept his hand on her neck, touched her wet hair, her collarbone, trailed down the side of her arm and brushed her waist. She picked up her drink and and downed it, trying not to breathe in through her nose as she did, then started walking to the large bed. He wanted to follow her. He didn't think she would let him, so he just watched. She crawled into it, the alcohol swirling in her brain.

"Don't look so forlorn", she called to him. "Being told no for once is probably good for you."

"Plenty of people try to tell me no," he said, pouring himself another glass, "not very many people succeed."

"Alright, Thomas. If you're going to shoot me, would you at least take care of my horse after I pass, please," she said, and he smiled, a little, but she didn't see it.

He finished the drink. Walked over to the bed and sat down on it, next to where she was huddled under the covers.

"Tessa," he said.

"Hmm," she replied, rather muffled and a little slurred.

"Why did you save me?" He muttered. "In the hospital. What made you think I deserved that?" She loved his voice. She wanted to listen to it forever, she wanted him to talk to her like he did to horses.

"I didn't give a fuck what you deserved," she muttered. "I just liked your eyes." Hers closed, and when he woke in the morning, somehow she was lying on his chest, hair splayed out behind her like the rising sun.


	12. Chapter 12

She woke up as he left, but it was early and she had never much cared for mornings. She had always been a light sleeper if she slept at all, but she told herself the vodka had helped the night before. The vodka, not him. She was surprised he had stayed so long, after not getting what he wanted from her. He stood up, nearly silent, still fully clothed. She immediately missed his warmth but didn't think she let him know she was awake. But of course he did anyway. He stood in the doorway, watching her.

"Good news or bad news first?" He asked.

She brushed wayward strands out of her eyes. She felt like she had been hit by a train. "I already know the bad news, and it has to do with it being the crack of dawn."

"The good news," he carried on, ignoring her. Typical. "is that I have two surprises for you today." He lit a cigarette. Inhaled. "Unfortunately, one of those surprises is also the bad news. So it all comes full circle, really."

"Fuck off, Tommy," And she heard him snort, but he let her go back to sleep.

Several hours later, she dressed in the same dress she had worn the day before. The white lace was turning grey at the edges from the coal dust. She frowned. Ellanor met her downstairs with a knowing expression that Tessa wished she deserved.

"Mr. Shelby has gone out for the day, but he told me to tell you to go get yourself some new clothes. He also said your surprise is waiting for you."  
Tessa grumbled. "He wants me to go shopping, does he? How am I meant to do that? The bastard took my horse and I haven't got a car, and- what surprise?"

Ellanor was beaming. Quite literally beaming, and Tessa winced. "Fuck. He didn't."

Ellanor nodded, her smile growing, if possible, even wider. "He certainly did."

"What good was it growing up surrounded by men with money just to meet more men with money now that I'm grown," Tessa grumbled to herself as she made her way down the entrance hall. "I could find a way to get a car with my own funds if I bloody well needed to, I have a trust fund the size of England, and even if I didn't, it isn't like I have a particular aversion to wo-," she opened the door, and slapped a hand over her mouth to hide her smile. "To working. An aversion to working."

Ellanor stood behind her, peering around Tessa's shoulder to peek at her face, then at the car, then back again.

"Had to get it special ordered, that's why it took a bit, see. The paint they shipped all the way over from the States, he said, he said you'd know what the color means?"

It was a gleaming, shiny, copper Bentley, red and orange and gold metallic. She had never seen a car that color in her life. The same color as her hair. The same color as her horse. She laughed.

"He said it was a thank you for saving his life." Ellanor took her arm, conspiratorial. "But you know, I think he's rather taken with you."

"Twice," Tessa said. "I saved his life twice. Do you have the keys?"

Tommy shouldered his way into the private room in The Garrison. John and Arthur looked up as he entered, and Finn stood firm outside the entrance, as if anything but his name would stop people from crossing him. Johnny Dogs was nursing a black pint of beer, but his brothers had empty glasses of whiskey.

"Talk to me," Tommy said, as a form of pleasantries.

"Alright, well, here's what we know. Leonard Reilly, the CMO, was being blackmailed into supporting a new facist party in the government, led by our favorite Germans," Arthur said, gesturing vaguely at Tommy. His voice was scratchy like he had been awake all night. "Now, what we think happened is that someone got wind that Reilly there wanted to get himself out of his little one sided contract, and was looking to enlist the help of yours truly in order to do so."

"Which made them come after us," John said. "And then when that didn't work, they went right after him."

"Who do we know who would have information about where a German mafia would hold a political hostage?" Tommy asked, as if asking would make the answer appear.

"We talked to Moss. Some other coppers. Got some names of the men who are trying to start this whole facist thing." John fidgeted with the pick in his mouth. "We could pay them a visit."

"Do it," Tommy said. "What did Michael find?"

"He knows what they're using to blackmail the old fucker. Turns out he's got a daughter that's hardly been heard of. Germans got wind of her being back on the island, but we couldn't find her name so I doubts they did either," Johnny Dogs was saying. Tommy's blood was rushing in his ears. "So old man Reilly might not have wanted the Blinders for himself. Might've been to try and stop them from gettin' to her."

"They didn't know."

"What?" Arthur asked, loudly.

"The men at the hospital. They didn't know it was her. Fuck, they would have taken her." He pushed his palms into his eyes until lights popped behind them. He opened them again, shook his head.

"The fuck is he going on about?" Arthur demanded. The other men shrugged. "Tommy. Tommy!" Arthur's eyes were flashing. "Taken who?"

"Tessa," he said.

"Who the fuck is Tessa?" Arthur growled. _Who the fuck is Tommy Shelby?_

"Tessa Reilly. Leonard Reilly's daughter. At the hospital, with the red hair."

Arthur's mouth was hanging open under his mustache, trying to catch up. John looked completely baffled. Johnny Dogs looked a bit blank, but Tommy could see that the cogs in his head were turning behind his eyes. Tommy pulled out a cigarette. Lit it. Exhaled.

"As it turns out, we, on quite literal threat of death, consented to offer Mr. Reilly his desired protection in exchange for a reasonable sum, as well as extend it to his daughter, due to extenuating circumstances. Which means that now, more than ever, we have a hostage to locate. It also means, boys, that there's someone you need to meet."

Tessa had a new dress but for once it wasn't helping. Her knee was bouncing and she could not command herself to stop. She shouldn't have done the cocaine she found in Tommy's drawer. Well, she shouldn't have done so _much _of the cocaine. Her father was missing. The Germans had taken him. The same men who had shot Tommy not two weeks ago. She was about to meet his family. At this particular moment, it was the last bit, more than anything else, that was making it impossible for her to keep still.

"He told me it was just to be the women for today, but I suppose plans change," Ellanor had said after putting down the phone. "So it looks like you'll get to meet the whole… gang."

_Poor choice of words_, Tessa thought, but it wasn't like she was being offered much of a choice herself.

"He said he would be here within the hour to pick you up." So Tessa was waiting in the living room, bounce bounce bouncing her leg. She lit a cigarette, one of Tommy's, she couldn't believe she was staying in his fucking _house- _

The front door opened. He looked absolutely calm, in his suit, with his hat, calm and _good, _and she wanted to kick him in the shins.

"I'll drive," she said, and he raised his eyebrows as she stormed past but did not attempt to argue.

Behind the wheel, she felt a bit better. The car really was beautiful. The breeze tousled her hair and cooled her cheeks, even if it did smell of coal and smoke. Tommy was silent, which bothered her, but she admitted to herself that if he was the talkative type, it would have bothered her much worse. After several minutes of him saying nothing but directions, he finally spoke.

"So, do you like it?"

She liked his accent. She liked the way he looked in that hat. She liked the car. "I do. I do like it." She ran her hands over the wheel.

"Not as much as your horse," he said. She smiled a little, reluctantly.

"Close second."

"Still, hopefully it's worthy payment for all your help."

"My help? You mean saving your life?"

"That is what I was referring to." He ashed his cigarette outside the open window of the car.

"Which I did twice, by the way."

She looked over at him to try to catch his smirk, but it wasn't there. He smelled like whiskey, even with the windows down. Something was wrong. How odd that she should be able to tell that, now.

"Polly and Ada may be a bit harsh," he said, after a few moments. "Arthur will stare but likely not take you very seriously. John knows better, you'll understand why once you meet his wife. Michael is young and trying to prove himself. Too hard, sometimes." Tessa nodded. She had already forgotten half the names. "We're here."

She pulled off in front of a dingy black townhome in a row of other dingy black townhomes on a dingy black street, surrounded by factories and flames and grit. This was where he came from. She climbed down out of her new car, which looked ridiculously out of place, and Tommy strode to the door like he owned the whole city, which, she realized now, he probably pretty much did. If she listened closely she could hear the click of his holster when he moved. He knocked hard on the door, the sound drowned out by the booming of a nearby furnace.

"It's me," He said, something she thought he was probably used to saying, used to people responding to. Admiration or fear? Did it matter?

The door swung open immediately. He walked inside and didn't look over his shoulder to see if she was following.


	13. Chapter 13

"So, this is her," Polly Gray/Shelby said with her lips quirked up around her clove cigarette in something that was the shape of a smile but wasn't one.

"I remember you," Arthur said brusquely. "You was at the hospital. We thought you was a nurse."

Tessa shook her head. "Not a nurse."

"So this is the reason you got shot up?" John said to Tommy, sucking his cig with an audible inhale. "Tell me bruv, she worth it?" Tommy rolled his eyes and managed to make even that look threatening.

The mousy woman next to John shoved an elbow into his side. Her hair and makeup and eyes were all a bit wild. "Fuck off, John, or I'll hang your balls by the bed."

The house, if it was ever even used as a house anymore, had the general air of being unoccupied for a while. All of its occupants were now so well to do, they could live separately from their gambling business. Back to the roots, indeed. She was imagining Tommy in this house, Tommy without all his wealth, Tommy without all the ghosts behind his eyes. It hurt.

His sister stood in a corner, arms folded. Tessa remembered seeing her at the hospital and being jealous of her for getting to be close to Tommy. And now Tessa was standing in his childhood home. _Life is strange_.

"And how do we know we can trust you?" Ada sized her up and down, chin tilted defiantly.

"You can trust her, Ada. She saved my life," Tommy said, eyes downcast as he lit his cigarette_. _When he looked up, inhaling, it was at her, and she met his eyes. They shone out in the dim room like crystal. Blue eyes, black hair, pale skin. A devil or an angel?

"Twice," she said, and he smiled only the smallest of smiles, but Polly saw it.

"Tessa," Tommy said, his voice and eyes lowering. Another hit. "We have some news about your father."

If it was up to Tessa, she would have been out under the sky, riding Chase far, far away. But she didn't know where Chase was, and she didn't know where her father was or even if he was okay, and he had been doing all of it for her and she never even knew. So she sat on the tiny stoop that served as the Shelby House's escape route and looked over at the river past the street and smoked a cigarette, and then another. She and her father had never been particularly close. She had lived with her mother in America for such a long while when she was young, that when her mother died and she was sent back to Europe she was thirteen and angry and her father had been married to his work anyway. But now he was suffering for her. He was going to enlist the protection of an entire gang, for her. That part had worked out itself, at least. Funnily enough. She took another drag. The back door creaked open.

"I brought tea," Ada said softly. Tessa took it as an apology for her sharpness earlier. She didn't blame her. Ada hadn't even known about Tessa's father, just that Tommy had taken some random girl in and she was now the Shelby's responsibility.

"Thank you," she said, and accepted the cup. Tessa was more of a coffee girl, herself.

Ada sat down gently beside her, worn china clinking. Her dress probably cost half as much as the house itself and she smelled like lavender.

"Saw your new car out front."

Tessa didn't know what to say, so she went to drink her tea, but it was much too hot, so she just sat silently and waited.

"He wouldn't do that for just anyone, you know," Ada said, turning to look at Tessa, to search her face as if to see what it was that made her special written in her features.

"I know," Tessa said, which made her feel odd, but she wasn't sure what else to say. The door creaked open and Polly leaned in the frame, the light from the kitchen illuminating her slim silhouette.

"You girls had best be careful, out here in the dark. People say there's gangs in these parts."

Ada and Tessa shared a smile, and the three women together stared out into the night.

In the house, Tommy sat with his brothers, leaning back in his chair. Arthur was sitting with his elbows on his knees, braced, agitated. John was standing, but paced around the room every so often, only to come back to his spot near the fire where he had originally been. Finn was playing with some knucklebones on the floor.

Arthur broke the silence. "So it's settled, then. Tomorrow we split up, take a name and a couple of our boys each. Knock some answers loose."

Tommy nodded, his whisky held aloft. John let out a long breath.

"Well, boys. Best get some sleep. Big day ahead of us." He clapped Tommy on the shoulder, nodded to Arthur, gathered Esme from the kitchen. The women took much longer to say their goodbyes, but soon Ada and Polly departed as well, until it was just Arthur and Tommy in the drawing room. Arthur took a swig of whisky from the bottle.

"I hope the fucking is worth it, Tom."

"We're not fucking, Arthur." Tommy took a drink.

"Well," Arthur said, putting the bottle down with more force than he probably meant to. "then you've got a hell of a lot to make up for before we go swim through the shit tomorrow." The amber bottle flickered in the light of the fire. It was empty. "G'night, Tommy."

Tommy was looking into the flames, and maybe he didn't hear his brother, but he didn't respond.

He certainly didn't hear her when she came into the room, she was sure of it, this time. Her arms were cold from the outside air but her insides were warm from the gin Polly had passed to her and Ada. She watched the back of his head for a while, the dark hair, longer on top and then fading suddenly to military austerity. He hardly moved except to drink or take a pull of his cig. She crept slowly across the room, feeling like just watching him had put her in a trance, and plucked his smoke from his fingers and before she could so much as lift her hand he had jumped up, moved so fast she didn't even see it, had his gun in his hand under her chin before the cigarette could get halfway to her mouth. She forgot to breathe, forgot how to move. The metal of the pistol was cold. His eyes were inches from hers, and they were cold too, before flickering slightly when the realization hit.

"Don't," he said, roughly, grabbing her face with his hand, squeezing her cheeks, just like the German in the hospital, "_ever_ sneak up on me like that again." He dropped the barrel from under her chin.

His voice was so low, so quiet. Her breathing was now coming in tiny little gasps, and she was afraid that if she tried to fit more air in her lungs, her heart would fall right out of its spot in her throat.

"Fuck," he said, even quieter. "Fucking scared me." His voice like music, his lips full, face like it was carved from marble by the hand of God. _Me too, _she wanted to say. He let go. She backed up quickly, grabbed blindly for his glass, took a drink between sharp breaths, bracing herself with her hands on the fireplace mantle. She should have known. She should have fucking known to stay away from a gangster who sliced people open with razor blades, Jesus Christ, how stupid was she? Her breathing evened out, slowly. The whiskey made her stomach clench but she took another drink. He spoke from behind her, his voice emotionless.

"You can stay here tonight. I'll go back to my house and come get you in the morning. I know it's modest, but no one will think to look for you here." She stared at him, open mouthed in disbelief.

"Just to be clear," she said, her voice quiet but shaking. "Your idea of keeping me safe is pulling a gun on me and then leaving me alone in a house no one has lived in for years?"

Tommy looked at her, right in her eyes in that arrogant, empty way he did.

"Yeah. That's pretty much it." Then he downed his glass, put his pistol back in its holster, pulled on his coat, and stalked out the door. She picked up and threw his empty glass at him as he it slammed it, and it shattered behind him on the wall but he did not look back, and she heard the lock click from the outside.

She drank the rest of Polly's gin, and some of Tommy's remaining whiskey too, but it tasted like him so she spat it out in the sink in a pointless, indignant gesture. She roamed the house like a ghost, a departed soul, just visiting this life, thanks. There were old photographs everywhere. They made her want to cry. She found the boxes that still had the imprints of his war medals nestled in their velvet linings, hidden under piles of old newspapers. She sat in the betting room, crushed chalk between her fingers and wished it was snow. She went through the cupboards of the kitchen, empty but for more tea. And even though she told herself she wasn't going to, after most of the gin was gone, she made her way upstairs, pushing open the doors to the bedrooms. She knew which one was Tommy's because it was the plainest, and because it was the one with the most light. He hated the dark, and if he slept he slept under the stars or left lamps burning, even though he would never admit to it. His bed was small and stiff. She had never lived like this. All her life, even in America, her upbringing had been modest at the least, "comfortable", to phrase it politely. She lay down on the bed and watched the sun creep up over the other dark buildings through the window, above the smoke stacks and pipes of the factories. And then, suddenly, she cried, for the first time in weeks, because she was lost and alone and she missed her father's smell of pipe tobacco and wood varnish and she missed the way he used to call her "Tessie" and when he taught her how to ride. When she huddled her face in the pillow, she found a long pipe under it, and that made her cry more, until she was holding an old pillow in one hand and a pipe in the other and sobbing, because she was too tired and scared to fight the knowledge that she was in love with the man who it belonged to and she hated thinking about him using it and needing it and she hated that she knew why. She lit it with the lighter she kept permanently in her pocket now next to a pack of cigarettes she had taken from Tommy and inhaled the excess sticky tar but it was still too strong and she saw her mother brother grandfather dying and she saw Tommy standing over two men in a burning car and then she saw him standing over all of her lost family, holding a gun. And then she saw nothing until the bright sunlight cracked through her eyelids.

Tommy didn't sleep that night. He didn't even bother to try. He didn't go home, either, he pulled the gleaming copper-colored car up with a screech of wheels on pavement and instead knocked on Alfie Solomon's "bakery" door. A surprised-looking Jewish boy opened the peephole, his eyes wide, curly hair visible because only reached the top of his head unless he stood on his toes to see through it.

"My name is Tommy Shelby," he said, and the door creaked open. Years ago, he had dreamed of the day that just saying his name would open doors, literal and figurative. It felt almost as good as he had imagined it would. The boy led him to the back office, where Alfie was leaned over his desk, glasses held up to his eyes, dangling chain glinting in the low glow of the lamplight.

"Dearie me, you gypsies never sleep, do you? Have a spell for that, eh? A little voodoo in place of a snooze?" He said, without looking up.

Tommy didn't respond, but gestured to Alfie's clearly very conscious and hypocritical state, which the other man must have either sensed or caught out of the corner of his eye, because he said,

"Oh yeah, well, but I've got work to do, don't I?" As if Tommy didn't. He adjusted his glasses, sniffed loudly. Tommy wondered vaguely if getting more sleep would help the condition of Alfie's skin. "Now, what kind of meeting do you need to be conducting at-," he paused to check his pocket watch, "two fifteen in the morning, hmm? Got some eyes you need to cut out that can't wait till they see their last morning light?"

"I wanted to know," Tommy said, instead of replying to any of the numerous, circling statements that Alfie had dependably made, "if you knew anything about a man named Adolf Hitler."

Alfie froze, ran a hand down his beard, then stood up very slowly. Tommy heard the distinctive sound of a gun cocking under the desk. "Now, listen, Tommy, if you've come here to threaten me, how's abouts you just go ahead and do it like a man, eh? Straightforward, like, yeah? Not by mentioning that name in my fucking presence-,"

"I'm not trying to threaten you, Alfie. If I was threatening you, believe me, you would know. Now sit the fuck down, yeah? That's a good man." Alfie sat, but warily. Tommy would have bet his weight in silver that there was still a gun pointed at him in the other man's hidden hand.

"Let's just talk, you and me. I believe we are in a position to help each other."


	14. Chapter 14

When Tessa woke, the house was bustling around her. There were men coming in and out of the front door at a steady rate, boisterous and giddy from the rush of their poor fiscal choices. She could hear Polly's sharp voice float up the stairs, reprimanding Finn for stealing from the betting pool to buy himself sweets. Her first thought was of Tommy. She was having difficulty remembering a time when it wasn't. Downstairs, she ran into Ada.  
"Left you here, did he?" Tessa was relatively sure the answer was written all over her face. Ada's arms were full of wiggling toddler. "When we were little he used to lock me in my room, try to stop me from sneaking out to go see boys." She grinned. "Didn't work though, I climbed out the window. That's how I ended up with this one," she nodded her head at the small boy in her arms. He was holding a little toy soldier.

"Wish I had known about the window last night," Tessa said.  
"Don't be too angry at him," Ada implored. Tessa felt like Ada was probably used to playing the role of peacemaker, which couldn't be easy, or infrequent, in this volatile family. "He only does it because he cares."

"I'll try not to," Tessa said. "Where is he, anyway?"

Ada's face fell, then grew grim. "He stopped by earlier."

"But where is he now?"

"He and the boys went down south. Said they had some business to attend to."

"Ah," Tessa said. "Business."

"He'll be alright. Tommy doesn't like to get his hands dirty if he doesn't have to."

Tessa had seen his hands plenty dirty. "That doesn't mean he won't."

Ada jutted out her small, sharp chin. "No, it doesn't mean he won't."

Tessa and Polly sat together at the table in what had been the dining room, smoking. The door to the betting parlor was open, but the commotion coming from inside sounded muted.

"Is this what it's like?" Tessa asked, and she wanted more than anything for the older woman to say no, this is just a one-off, usually they just sit around and drink and talk about the war. But she didn't.

"This is what it's like," Polly said, and puffed her cigarette like she had been sitting in that same chair smoking the same one for a thousand years.

Tommy stood outside the house of a factory owner. A factory owner who had a heavier hand in political movements than did many of the members of parliament themselves, a factory owner who happened to be a closeted facist. Closeted for good, now, hopefully, if Tommy's threats had stuck. Not that it mattered. He hadn't known where Leonard Reilly was being kept. None of them would. Tommy let the smoke rush down his throat, held it in his lungs, pushed it out of his mouth. A car was coming down the long drive at a brisk pace. Tommy watched it approach, stuck a hand in his pocket. Inhaled, exhaled. The car pulled up abruptly, disrupting the perfectly even gravel outside the mansion. Arthur jumped down. He had a spray of blood on his cheeks, his collar, his knuckles were split.

"They didn't know, Tommy. None of 'em knew. None of them knew a _fucking _thing," he spat, nearly foaming at the mouth. Tommy cleared his throat. Inhaled. "We hit all the German pubs. Been at it since midday and got jack shit for all the blood we spilled." He paused, worked his jaw. "So where is the old man, eh?"

"I don't know," Tommy said, looking skyward.

"Oh, you don't know. Nobody fucking knows."

"No. But I know how to find out."

"I thought _this _was how we was supposed to find out, Tom," Arthur said, lifting his bloodied hands. "Or do you mean to tell me you sent us into the muck for nothing?"

Tommy sighed. "There was a possibility it would work. I can't overlook any possibilities."

Arthur nodded. "A possibility. I see." And then he clocked Tommy in the face so hard he almost went down. The pain shot through his skull and burst behind his eyes. "Have some blood on your face for the rest of us, eh? Them German bastards are fuckin insane, Tommy, and you sent us after them for a fucking possibility?"

Arthur's punch had opened a cut above Tommy's eyebrow, and blood was trickling down. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, but otherwise stood silently. Arthur approached him until he was inches from Tommy's face. His hair was in disarray, a button missing at his collar.

"I dunno what the fuck you're playing at, but some of our boys got seriously injured today. And you spend your time talking politics in a fancy house with no dirt on your shoes. All for some girl." He spat on the ground next to Tommy, who snapped.

"Listen to me," He said, not backing down from Arthur's glare. He pushed a hand against his chest to shove him back out of his face. "We are not safe while the Germans have their hands on that man. They want his power and they see us as the only thing standing in their way. Hey! You hear me? We. Are. Not. Safe." A muscle flexed in Arthur's jaw as he ground his teeth. "The only reason they haven't laid a full-on ambush is because the coppers in Heath are still on our side and they know it. And you cry about our boys getting a little roughed up? They'll be shot where they sleep if we don't find Reilly soon."

Arthur looked at him, dead on. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were pursed, but he was listening. He sighed, quietly, and Tommy took it as a sign of defeat. "So how are we gonna do it, Tommy, eh?"

Tommy pulled out his cigarette case, flicked it open. His eyes were empty. "I have a plan."

The men arrived home in three cars, one of them a metallic orange-red. They piled inside and Ada embraced her eldest brother, who came in first and whose hands were red like he was wearing gloves and who had to crouch down to receive her embrace, and Polly aggressively inspected John's face when he followed closely behind Arthur, which had a brilliant black eye blooming, but he pushed her off with excuses and placations and reached out to ruffle Finn's hair, who was standing by the doorway worriedly, and kissed his wife, who was holding their youngest in her arms.

"Where's Tommy?" Tessa demanded, and Arthur was about to respond when Tommy stepped through the door, and all she could think was _at least he's walking thank fucking god he's well enough to walk, he isn't dead, dead men can't walk _and she shoved past all of his family, quite rudely, and threw herself into his arms with such force he took a step back to regain his balance. The room went very quiet suddenly.

"I'm alright," he said against her ear, but she squeezed him harder until he gave her a brief embrace in return. She was very aware of his coat under her fingers, the feeling of his chest rising and falling as he breathed. She breathed him in and her relief was a tangible thing that smelled like woods and smoke and sharp winter air that proved he was alive, that he was fine, that he was right there in her arms. When they broke apart, seven sets of eyes were fixed upon them. Tommy cleared his throat, loudly. He looked down at Tessa, but addressed the rest of the room.

"We didn't find Leonard Reilly." Her heart sank. Like a stone, a tiny little pebble into an ocean of hope. _Plink_, it went, and then it went all the way down to the bottom. There was a cut above Tommy's eye. Otherwise, he looked completely unharmed.

"But I know how we can," he said. Polly exhaled. The whole family trusted him implicitly. They would do whatever it was he told them to do. All excluding Esme, perhaps, who was bouncing her baby and looking between Tommy and her husband with daggers in her eyes. "Tessa, I need to talk to you alone, for a moment." Tessa had not been expecting this.

"Alright," She said, doing her best to hide her apprehension, the immediate, nervous twist in her gut.

Tommy turned and headed up the stairs, one hand on the railing and the other combing through his hair. Arthur gave Tessa a look that she thought was meant to be interpreted as fortifying when she passed him. She followed Tommy as he led her to his room, held the door open for her, and she smelled his dark, clean smell again when she passed him. Her heart started to beat erratically. She sat down on the bed. Her leg was bouncing. Tommy put his hands in his pockets and began in a low voice.

"Nobody knows where your father is being held. Not the politicians, not the coppers, not the members of the fucking gang. They're being careful. The only people who know where he is are the ones who took him there." He met her eyes. Blue blue blue. She thought maybe he wanted her to say something, but she didn't, so he went on.

"Which means the only way to get to him is for them to take us there, too." He stopped. She waited. "For us to follow them there," he said.

When she realized what he meant she gave a stupid, involuntary little gasp. "Oh," she said. He watched her. Unblinking. Direct.

"You want me to be bait."

"You're their leverage against him. They can't use that leverage unless they have you, and unless he knows they have you. I'm willing to bet if they got you, they'd take you right fucking to him."

Tessa dropped her eyes. "I'd need you to agree to it," he told her.

She released a shaky breath. Her lungs felt like they were being squeezed.

"You're a terrible fucking bodyguard," she said, and looked up again, and as they watched each other she knew he knew but she said it out loud anyway. "I'll do it."

And as she looked into his eyes, like trapped souls, she realized suddenly that she no longer had to fight the urge to look away.


	15. Chapter 15

The family sat around the fire, spread out in the living room, all with glasses in hand except the children. Even Finn was holding a mug of beer.

"_Mild!" _Polly had called to John, who was trying to smuggle his younger brother a shot of whiskey. Arthur and John were playing cards, but Esme was mouthing Arthur's hand to John over his shoulder, so Arthur was losing spectacularly. Tommy was half watching, half lost in thought. Polly was reading the paper. Tessa was drinking, and trying not to think about her father, and the Germans, and the plan, and failing.

"Fancy a game, Tess? I think I've got luck on my side tonight," John gloated over Arthur's "_Shit!" _as he slapped yet another winning card down.

"I'm alright for now, thanks. I prefer watching, anyway," she smiled at him, as best she could. Tommy's eyes jerked from their gaze into the fire and scanned the room.

"How about some chess, John Boy, eh?" He asked. John's smug face fell. Esme winced. Chess was much harder to cheat at. Tommy saw the look of trepidation on John's face, and rolled his eyes. "I'll let everyone else help, to even the board." Esme raised her eyebrows, waited for the bomb to drop. "_If _you all drink every time John loses a piece."

"Give it to him, Johnny!" Arthur said, rolling up his sleeves like he was going into a fight. Polly shook her head from her spot at the table. "We'll show the arrogant bastard what's what."

"You'll have us all knocked out in an hour, Arthur," Polly said, eyes still on her paper.

"They need you, Pol," Tommy said, and there was a little sparkle, a little mischief in his eyes. It made Tessa's heart clench. Who had he been, before?

"Fine," she said, folding her paper with a rustle. Ada was passed out in the armchair closest to the fire, cheek mushed against it, snoring quietly.

Tessa watched them play, watched them all get progressively more drunk and lose more and get drunker and lose more, and she realized suddenly that she was crying, tears splashing gently down onto her lap. _A family. _She had never had this. Not even the kind that still had blood on their clothes from the events of the day. Her brother left to fight in the war while she was still young, and never came back. Her mother's delicate fingers, the ones she had passed on to her daughter, clutched empty bottles with empty eyes. Her grandfather had been the only one to ever show her any true warmth or affection, and by the end of his life he wouldn't have been able to tell her face out of a sea of strangers. They were all dead and gone and she and her father were likely about to go the same way. She stood up, swaying slightly, keeping her head down to hide her eyes, and felt Tommy watch her as she left the room.

She heard him climb the stairs quietly a while later, after she had cried silently until all the liquid left in her was 80 proof. He opened the door and leaned against the frame, and she could see him out of the corner of her eye but she didn't turn around. She was smoking one of his cigarettes out the open window, listening to the sounds of the trains and the factories, still awake, always awake, even in the dark, even through the night. He walked over, stretched out on the bed beside her, and sighed.

"Saw you this morning. Holding the pipe," he said, nodding to where it lay on the bedside table where she had placed it haphazardly when she woke up. He held a hand out and she passed the cigarette to him, and he brought it to his mouth.

"Mm," She said. She took the smoke back. "Got any more?"

"Not here, no." He wasn't looking at her. All she could see was his profile. She turned back to the window.

"Pity." The smoke curled out between her lips, whispered away into the night sky, where it mingled with the stray clouds covering the stars.

"I did get you this," he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a bottle of white powder. "For return payment."

She went to take it, but he held it firmly in his hand, then turned to look at her. There were expectations in his face, written all over it like a child's school board. She furrowed her eyebrows and snatched it from him. Then she stood, the rusty bed creaking loudly with her movements, knocked some out onto the desk in the corner of the room, and cut it into practiced lines with the edge of her lighter. _Finally. _He stood too.

"Tessa," he said, with the same voice he used on anyone who wasn't obeying him. She was, though. She had agreed to be the lamb in his little offering. She did not deserve that tone. She ignored him and put a finger on her nose and breathed in a practiced line, closed her eyes. He came towards her, she could hear it, she could feel it. Like when you know something dangerous is nearby, like how you would know you were standing on the edge of a cliff even if you were blind.

"What?" She said, eyes still closed. She opened them when it became obvious he wasn't going to answer until she had.

"I'm not going to be your fucking snow dealer. This," He gestured between them, "was just because I owed you."

"No?" She said. She smiled at him, but it wasn't kind. "You're everyone else's, but not mine?"

He lifted his chin and looked down at her, head tilted, eyes like sin, like greed and lust and pride. His jawline would make a lovely seat. She licked her finger and swirled it through the crystals on the table, took a step closer to him.

"No," he said. But he let her slide her finger into his mouth, leave the powder on his upper gums. She trailed her finger across his teeth, straight and white on top, the single crooked one on the bottom. "Not yours."

"Why not?" She asked, half seductive, half demanding, and her eyes flickered up at him, like grenades going off. "That's what gangsters do, isn't it?"

He watched her. Her eyes trailed back down to his mouth. He could almost see her pupils dilating.

"If that's not what you are, then what are you?" She asked, her fingers grabbing on to the front of his vest. "What are you, Tommy?" The two unsaid words hung in the air. Her chin was tilted up so that she could stare right at him and he was looking down at her, asking her with his eyes if she knew what she was doing, if she was ready for the consequences.

She knew he knew what she was asking. She knew he knew that she was drunk, and high, but she didn't think that that would stop him, and that just made her want him more. She could feel every tiny bit of space between them, in the tiny room he had grown up in, in a tiny corner of a tiny world. She felt like she was being cracked open, like an egg dropped out of a shopping basket onto a sidewalk. She could feel him breathing. She could see each eyelash, she thought she could probably count them if she wanted to. She let go of his clothes before she let herself start. Took a step back. Her veins were thrumming, her head felt bright and warm.

"Why do you do it?" He asked, and she was thrown off. The whole world was thrown off when he was near her and the only color in it was his eyes. Everything else was grey and black and grey.

"It can help," she said, echoing his words back to him, and his stare was so intense, everything about him was so intense, and he was all around her, his smell, his room, she was drowning in him and it still wasn't enough. She looked at him, looked at him, waited for him to break. He didn't. He watched her right back, reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes, only breaking eye contact when his eyes flickered down as he lit it. He took a drag, pushed the smoke out of his mouth and breathed it right back up through his nose.

"I'm not going to fuck you when you're high," he told her.

She wanted to slap him. She tried, but it was halfhearted, and he caught her wrist with one hand, took the cig out of his mouth with the other.

"Who fucking said anything about me fucking you?" It was a little slurred, which she tried to make up for through the venom in her tone. But who was she kidding, really? She could scream it if she wanted to and it still wouldn't hide the fact that just the way he was looking at her was making her tremble. Maybe it was the cocaine. She told herself it was probably the cocaine. She wanted to move closer to him. That was the vodka.

"_When _I fuck you," he said, deep and slow, impenetrable stare fixed on her, "every part of you will be there for it. Every part of you will be asking for it," his eyes moved down her body and back up again, taking their time, "so when you decide that's what you want, stay off the drugs and let me know."

She was shaking, she was gasping, he was hardly even touching her. She wondered if he could feel her pulse in the wrist he was still holding. He watched her fall apart in front of him like he was completely unaffected, too composed and too in control and she wanted his walls and his facade and his apathy gone, she wanted a reaction, any kind of response, the powder would make her do anything for one.

"So talk to me until I come down," she said, and he breathed the smoke in sharply between his teeth, hissing like a snake, taken by surprise at her boldness and she felt a brief glimmer of victory for having power over him too. He blew it out through his nose over her head.

"Talk to you?" His voice rumbled through his chest.

She slid her free hand up around his neck, feeling the short hair on the back of his head, brushing her fingers over it, up and down, the texture forgien and oddly pleasant. Tommy closed his eyes and lowered his head.

"Your family listens to everything you say. Like you're a king and they're your subjects."

"My family has a lot to be grateful for," he said, but not like it made him proud. Not like it made him anything at all.

"Does it get lonely up on the throne?" She asked him, or the drugs asked him, or the whiskey asked him. His head was bowed down, mouth near her ear, and when he breathed it made her shiver. He didn't answer.

"Talk to me," she said.

"What is it you want me to say?" He asked her, like he would tell her whatever she wanted, but probably only to stop the questions.

"Something in Romani."

He huffed a tiny scoff of a laugh. "A gypsy king," he said.

She kissed his neck. "Tommy," she said. She kissed him again, right below the first. His skin was smooth, supple, taut, stretched tight like him. He smelled like sandalwood forests, like cigarettes, like rain. His fingers flexed around her wrist. "Please?"

He sighed, but at the end of the breath, he spoke words she couldn't understand but loved to hear. He could be reciting a biscuit recipe, for all she knew, but she didn't care. She closed her eyes briefly and her lips formed a small smile, letting his voice wash over her, and it sounded like flutes and rivers and the language that people speak to animals, and the animals understand. She slipped her wrist out from where it remained in his grasp, moved it to his face, tangled her other fingers in his hair. She felt the line of his jaw, his cheeks, opened her eyes when she brushed the cut above his temple. He didn't flinch.

"That was just Arthur," he said. His eyes were open but gazing past her, at the floor. She was surprised that he hadn't already moved away. It felt like he wanted to. She was surprised he had even told her.

"Still, it might scar."

"Ah, well," he said, taking the last drag of his cigarette, tossing it on the ground behind her, "What's one more, eh?"

She wanted to ask him to speak Romani again, but she didn't. They stood pressed together, neither speaking, her breathing sharp and erratic, his slow and controlled.

"Are you sober?" He asked her.

"Yes," she said. _No, _she thought.


	16. Chapter 16

He looked at her. Her pupils were huge in the darkness. He pressed his lips together. Looked up at the ceiling. _Who the fuck is Tommy Shelby? _

"Fuck," he said, and he kissed her.

_What are you? _She had asked him. He slid his hands down her thighs, lifted her up, had her up against the wall. _Isn't that what gangsters do? _Her thighs were soft in his hands and he marvelled at how easy it was to carry her, to do whatever he wanted to her, and he couldn't feel the bulletholes but he thought he could feel the blood or maybe the power rushing in his veins. He couldn't tell if his family was awake downstairs, listening. Thunder or the boom of a factory rattled the room, but it would have taken the roof falling down on his head to stop him now. She tasted like cinnamon and kissed him back, deep, hungry, her tongue slipping into his mouth, but he pulled back to look at her, to see her, to watch her chest rise and fall. Her eyes were closed but they opened, slowly, her lips parted and wet. He braced her against the wall with his hips so that he could use a hand to wipe the stray powder off her cheek, moved her hair so that he could press against her neck with his lips and teeth. She moaned, softly, and he wanted her to be so, so much louder, wanted to make it so that she didn't have the option to keep quiet. He told her that he wanted her, in Romani, and even though she didn't know what he was saying she made another beautiful sound, and as his hands pushed her dress up past her thighs she said "Thomas", once and then again as he braced against her and she pulled his shirt and vest open so that she could touch him, everywhere, her nails digging into his back and his fingers into her thighs.

"Look at me," he told her, and he held her gaze until he moved his hips slowly and her eyes rolled back at the pressure like she had just done a line. She dropped her forehead to his shoulder and pressed him closer, urging him, begging him with her hands and with her voice. She sucked gently on his neck with her beautiful mouth and he groaned low, rolling his hips against her again and she reached down to grasp him over his trousers and he held her face in his hand, her skin smooth under his fingers except for the cut on her cheek and he slid his hand down to her throat and squeezed and kissed her again, softly, and he was in the process of using his free hand to pull her knickers to the side, holding her up with just his hips pressed against hers, when a voice made a sound from the doorway, which, as it turned out, they had left ajar.

"Ahem," Polly said delicately, very barely attempting to hide her smirk. Tessa whipped her head around but Tommy only sank his onto her shoulder, which her dress was hanging haphazardly off of, mentally counting to ten and forcing his fingers away from their position between her legs, so close he could feel the heat radiating from her.

"Polly," Tommy said, through gritted teeth, "What?"

"A man is here for you downstairs. Said his name was Solomons." Her lips quirked upwards as her eyes took in the scene, turning to leave, calling out, "And Tommy? Next time, close the fucking door," as she did so.

Tessa unwrapped her legs from behind his back and used the wall behind her to steady herself. She felt unsteady like she had just gotten off a boat. A very, very fast boat, that was setting off rockets and also jumping through time and space. Tommy's breath was harsh in her ear and he put his hands on either side of her head, bracing himself, trapping her in a cage of his arms and, as he pulled back, his eyes. She wanted to say something to him, but the pulsing need was still clouding her mind so completely that all she could do was pant and stare. She wanted to touch him again. She couldn't believe she wasn't still touching him, right now, this instant-

He was taking a step back, reaching up to button his shirt. She wanted to scream, and not for the reasons she would have preferred.

"Who is Solomons?" She asked, her voice shockingly steady.

"A business partner," he said, shrugging on his vest, which had somehow ended up on the floor. His lips were swollen and his hair was tousled and he had never looked better to her, not even when he was dripping in blood. She stared at him. Sighed. She could finish this by herself, but she knew it would hardly be worth it. At least now she had the great mystery of Tommy Shelby solved. Money or sex? Lust or greed? How much did he really have, she wondered as he pocketed his watch, and how many notches on the bedpost? Was it just wood chips by now? More trees made into more paper into more pounds? In the end, maybe it was all the same. She didn't try to stop him leaving.

"I'll be back," he said, a gesture that surprised her. She hummed a little, refastening her stockings so that she didn't have to look at him. Sex was one thing. It couldn't hurt, and even if it did, a little bit, that just made it better. This was more than that. She had known. The moment she had seen those eyes open in the hospital, she had known, and jumped right into it anyway. Right into him. His business partner, whoever it was, would probably think he had just interrupted a session Tommy had paid for. Like he needed to pay. She thought he probably did anyway. _In the end, it was all the same._ She closed her eyes and let her head thud back against the wall.

Tommy entered the living room just as the black tassels of Polly's shawl whipped around the corner behind her as she left. In her place stood Alfie Solomons, hat slightly askew, hands folded serenely over his cane as he took in the aftermath of the doomed chess game. Arthur was sprawled on the floor, pieces scattered next to him, John half on top of his legs and half folded over the nearest chair. Ada was still curled in her position by the fire, less tightly now, a blanket tucked over her shoulders.

"Solomons," Tommy said, flicking his lighter and sliding his cigarettes back into his pocket, "I am not joking when I say that this better be fucking good."

"It seems to me that whatever I tell you can't never be as good as what you was just doing," Alfie said, gesturing vaguely at Tommy's appearance, "so why don't we lower that bar a smidge, eh? Information, you know, it comes when it pleases. A bit like yourself, mate."

The unexpected joke made Tommy's lips twitch, but did not cure his irritation. Or help with the fact that he was still thinking about Tessa, pupils wide, lips parted, saying his name.

"What information?"

Arthur stirred on the floor. "Whozat?" He mumbled groggily, before slipping back into a drunken sleep. Tommy sighed.

"Come on," He waved at Alfie to follow him out of the house. "Lets give the degenerates their space."

The cane clunked behind him as he led the other man onto the silent front streets. He could feel the slight warmth of his smoke between his fingers against the cold night air.

Alfie stared up at the night sky like that composed the entire reason for his visit, to look at the coal-clouded sky above Small Heath and stop Tommy from getting a fuck.

"There's a hunter up there," he said, pointing with his cane. "Orion. Kind of a fuckin' funny name, really, but no worse than Alfred, and I'll be honest, mate, I think out of the two of us, he's got it better than me," the cane smacked the cobbled streets with a dull thunk. "Up in the sky, yeah, couldn't give a rats arse what goes on down in these shitty, smelly streets. Fucking better life, that one."

Tommy cleared his throat.

"Oh, right, you was trying to get back to your lady friend. Wonder what she'd do, if she saw everything, like that hunter up there? Wonder what she'd say," he fixed Tommy with a piercing stare, the kind most people wouldn't dream of risking. Tommy rubbed the cut above his eye, which was stinging.

"Did you come here to give me fucking relationship advice, or do you actually have some useful information?"

Alfie tutted at his manners. "As a matter of fact, I do, but you'd best watch your tone with people who you're trying to partner with. Can be very off-putting, see, make you seem untrustworthy." Tommy rolled his eyes without moving them. It was one of his talents. "So this fucking Adolf fellow, he's been trying to gather himself up a following in these here fine cities of England, yeah? Wants to stir up some political support and whatnot. So his boys snatch your lady friend's father, right, tell him he's gotta come out and support old Adolf or they'll find his only daughter and do with her as they please. Which you managed to do first, by complete accident, which is how most of your successes happen, so bravo to you on that." He sniffed. "But old Reilly was looking for protection before they got to him, wanted your Blinders, knew they wouldn't mind roughing up a couple Germans if it came down to it. And somebody heard 'im say your name. So you'd be all caught up in this even if you didn't have your cock in his daughter." He laughed, a great guffaw, as if this was the funniest situation he had ever encountered. Tommy was beginning to tire of being told things he already knew.

"And then you come to me, right, telling me about all of this like I don't already know, proposing your deals and whatnot." He adjusted his hat. "But I'm here to tell you that I 'ave decided to take you up on your offer. And I can even sweeten it for you, for a price," he said, touching the side of his nose, "because I 'ave got a man on the inside. See, that there's something you didn't know. Me, I've just been waiting to take these fuckers down cause I just don't like 'em. Fascist fucks. Now, my man don't know where old Reilly is being held, but me thinks if you get the girl in on it, well." He spread his hands, like Jesus at passover. "Your plan just might work, my friend. He can pick her up. The Germans will let 'im bring her in." He sniffed again. "Too happy about the catch to check who strung the bait."

Tommy fiddled with his cigarette. It was his plan. And he still didn't like it. "Once we locate the hostage, the Blinders can cause enough of a distraction nearby to remove most of the security. Your men are welcome to whatever we find, aside from Reilly. Coppers will be notified once Tessa is taken and will be instructed not to intervene, so choose ones who know how to shoot. Because the Germans certainly will. When can your man be in position?"

"Ah," Alfie said, staring off into the distance. "Day after tomorrow, I should think."

"Good. The Blinders will be ready." He put out his hand. "Do we have a deal?"

Alfie shook, his hands covered with thick leather gloves. "Down Orion comes from the sky," he muttered, and he walked away, back to his waiting car, tap tap tapping with his cane.


	17. Chapter 17

When Tommy's footsteps echoed on the stairway, she lay down in his bed, turned and faced away from him. The sheets smelled of dust and the lingering traces of opium smoke, but not like him, which she was grateful for. But soon he was near her, standing over her, so she could smell him anyway and it made no difference. This sent an irrational flash of anger through her. He was everywhere, in her lungs, in her mind, and she could not escape. He sat at the edge of the bed, not touching her. He ran his hand down his face.

"Tessa. I know you're not asleep," he said. He always managed to impress her and make her want to slap him, simultaneously. She thought most everyone who met him probably felt that way. She wasn't special. "Solomons has a man on the inside. He's going to offer his support. With our… plan."

Tessa held back a scoff. _Our _plan. But she had agreed, after all. She supposed she had as good as come up with it, at this point. At least Tommy hadn't been meeting someone about drugs or whiskey or races or whatever else he was caught up in. That tempered her, a little bit. She needed his help. She couldn't see him, but she could feel his back just barely pressed against hers while she stubbornly faced away from him. Every bit of him was hard, like steel. There was no softness in his eyes or his body or his heart. She thought of the car he had gotten her. Just to repay a debt. The lightness in his face as he played chess with his family. Overshadowed by the darkness of war. And she thought about how, even if she survived the Germans, she was completely fucked. He sighed, and went to stand. She turned and caught his hand. He looked back at her, dead eyes questioning.

"Stay," she said, because she was just like everyone else, she wasn't special, and she was a stupid, begging mess for Tommy Shelby. He cleared his throat, scratched the back of his head. She waited for him to make an excuse, and didn't care. Playing with a knife would hurt eventually no matter what, did it really matter when it cut her?

He sat back down. She wanted to raise her eyebrows, but kept her face neutral.

"It's a small bed," he said.

"I suppose you'll just have to endure being close to me," she told him, and he blinked and shook his head, which was his version of a smile. He took off his expensive, shiny shoes, shrugged off his vest. He lay down beside her and she shifted so that she could rest her head on his chest. His heart beat comfortingly, slow. He put his arm up behind his head and she tried not to fixate on how it made his muscles flex and play under his shirt. She breathed him in through her nose, closed her eyes. To her surprise, he moved his other arm down around her, hand on her shoulder. She kept her eyes closed as if opening them would ruin the fantasy, that he was a good man, and she was a good woman, and everything was simple and easy and they weren't forced together trying to bring down a German gang who had taken her father hostage. She focused on breathing, on his smell, on his heartbeat under her ear.

She felt small in his arms, his hand wrapping around her shoulder like her bones were hollow, like she was bird that could fly away. But her fist was gripping his shirt tightly, even as she slept, and the soft curves of her body and the fine lines of her face had fire in them, even as her eyes were closed, even as she clung to him. She looked like she came from fine breeding, like she had the Arabian sun inside her, she looked like the one horse no one could break. Her hair was draped across his arm and sifted through his fingers, dense and expensive-feeling, like hotel sheets. He watched her breathe, her mouth barely open, sometimes forming words he couldn't seem to catch no matter how he listened. He felt the familiar darkness creeping up on him, all the faces, the permanent images of violence, of every atrocious act he had ever committed and ever seen played like a film at the pictures, but instead of closing his eyes and drowning in them, he kept them open, kept looking at her, like she was a lifeline. He tried not to blink. The faces swam at him even in the brief milliseconds of darkness behind his eyelids. She muttered something, moved one of her legs over his. He stared up at the ceiling, anywhere but the walls, imagining he could see through it, then through the smoke, up to the stars. To the hunter.

"Tommy," she said, her eyes moving under her lids. He wondered what it was that was making her say his name in her sleep. He wished she wouldn't. He wished she knew he was poison, but maybe she did. Maybe that would just make her take more of him. He reached up and brushed a wayward strand of red off of her face, her creamy cheek with it's smattering of freckles, like the stars, like Orion.

"I've never met anyone like you," he said to her, quietly, only because he knew she could not hear him.

The morning cracked bright and loud through the window. The machines never stopped, all through the night they boomed and cracked, sending their dust and smoke through the air. But Tessa heard none of it, or had already become accustomed to the noise, because the sound that woke her was the sound of the door creaking open. No one in this house ever knocked, it seemed. Arthur stood in the doorway, and was about to speak before he took in the scene in front of him, Tommy's face soft and unlined in sleep, half of Tessa's body on top of his, her face lifting from it's spot nestled in his shoulder. Arthur's expression turned so gentle it shocked her. Of all the family, he seemed the most brutal, and he seemed the most kind.

"Is everything okay?" Tessa asked, her rusty voice cracking on the last word.

"'S fine. Polly was just wondering where Tommy was, is all. He's usually up before all of us, stomping 'round, making sure nobody gets any rest."

"He never sleeps, does he?" Tessa asked, looking down at his face, so close to hers. He looked beautiful, and harmless, the slope of his nose and lines of his cheeks evoking so much affection in her that she pulled back from him a little, reflexively.

Arthur shrugged from the doorway. "Looks like he's sleeping now," he said, and then turned and walked away without a goodbye. His receding footsteps woke Tommy, and the change was startling. One minute he wasn't alert, wasn't aware, and then he was completely. She could feel that he wanted to move, so she scooted away from him, as much as the tiny bed allowed. When he sat up, he made a noise that she felt between her legs, and she wanted to push him back down onto the bed and finish what they had started the night before. Instead she watched the line of his back as he stretched the sleep from his limbs, climbing out of the bed. She wondered if he always slept in his clothes. He was pulling out a cigarette from his case, and he turned to look at her. She wished he wouldn't, at least until she had brushed her hair.

"Ask Polly or Ada if you can borrow some clothes. We're going out today."

"We are? Where to?"

He was buttoning his vest, spoke through the smoke floating out of his mouth. "We are, yes."

She raised an eyebrow at him, a prompt, a demand. She didn't like surprises. He gave in.

"How would you like to visit your horse?"

She smiled, but it was like smiling with glass in her cheeks. "Seeing as it could be my last day alive, and all?"

"You get used to it." He reached his hand out to help her out of bed. "Come on. I'll give you the grand tour of the Shelby stables."


	18. Chapter 18

As it turned out, only about a third of the Shelby "stables" were used to actually house any animals, and the rest were furnished as stables on the outside but were hiding contraband of all description in boxes under the hay in the stalls. The drive out to the country would have been exceptionally pleasant on a day where Tessa wasn't constantly preoccupied with thinking about how she could be dead this time tomorrow. Tommy was, as usual, completely and irritatingly at ease, or at least, impeccably composed, and she let him drive her car on account of him being the one who had paid for it, and because her hands were shaking. The sun was in rare form, beaming down on the country roads, and the smell of the grass and the barely was a relief after days of nothing but soot and ash. She watched it stream through the leaves of the trees as Tommy sped along at a completely unreasonable pace, but she supposed that if she knew she had absolutely nothing to fear from the coppers, she would behave the same way. Her breaths kept coming in stupid little gasps and she was grateful for the rumble of the engine to drown them out. At least she would get to see Chase one last time, if anything happened to her. If anything happened. Something was probably going to happen. Had they hurt her father? Would the plan work? Her heart was pounding so quickly she could feel it in her stomach, and it was making her regret even the sad breakfast of tea and toast that she had forced down that morning. Tommy wasn't looking at her, eyes straight ahead, expertly maneuvering the car but looking distant, like his head was elsewhere. She was fine with this. He was the last person on earth she would want to discuss her cowardice with. She wondered if he was ever afraid. If so, she had only seen it in the briefest of moments, when she surprised him and he pulled the gun on her, the look in his eyes after the German in the car had nearly blown his head off. How did he keep all that buried under the floorboards of his mind? How much control did that take, and how much of a toll?

After a little over an hour of driving, they pulled down a dirt lane, sending dust billowing after the wheels of the car. Tommy had told Charlie, and, by extension, Curly, where he was going, but no other members of the family. The plan had been as established as it was likely to get, and any more deliberation at this point would only lead to unnecessary complications. He went through the potential outcomes in his mind, the percentages, the likelihoods. It was a mental game he played, betting on the odds of his own survival. Somehow quantifying such things made them approachable, kept him sane. He was relatively less confident about them than he would have liked. It was about seventy-thirty that Tessa would be taken to where they were keeping her father, and that was the big gamble. He assumed they would keep her alive, as it was necessary for her to be used as leverage. He assumed that Solomons would hold up his end of the bargain, due to his own personal proclivity against the Germans. He assumed the Blinders' diversion would suffice to distract the German guards and heighten the possibility of gaining access to the building, or wherever Reilly was being held. He was doing a lot of assuming. Tessa was silent next to him, back tense like a steel rod. He screeched to a stop in front of the largest stable, the one that was actually equipped to support equines and not just hold stolen goods. He climbed down out of the car and gestured for Tessa to remain, as a man holding a rifle approached them from inside the doors.

"Who's this here, this is private property, this is- oh. Hello, Mr. Shelby," He said, his voice and demeanor changing dramatically. "We weren't told you would be visiting today."  
"That's because I didn't tell you," Tommy said, pulling out a cigarette. He waved at Tessa from her position in the car. "Put the gun away, there's a lady present."

The man gave him a sloppy military salute that proved he had never actually served, and Tommy wanted to roll his eyes. Where was Charlie finding these green fucks?

"How many men do we have here?" Tommy asked, eyeing the stables.

"Five patrolling at any time, sir." The man told him.

"Good. Send them all home. But bring the Arabian out first."  
"The big red, sir?"

"Yeah," He sucked in the smoke. "The big red."

"He yours, sir? New racer? He's got a bitch of a kick, that one. Wouldn't let any of us near him, 'cept that silly man who brought him in."

Tommy nodded. "I was warned about that."

Tessa moved past him. He had heard her approach, her boots crunching on the gravel behind him, and would have known anyway, because the man's expression changed from one of resentful respect to appreciative respect the moment he saw her.

"I'll get him," she said, tossing her hair behind her shoulders. The man was ogling the pale slope of her chest, and Tommy wanted to put his cigarette out on his eye. "Where is he?"

"Er," the man said, glancing between Tessa and Tommy for instruction. Tommy looked at him, giving nothing away, letting him flounder. "No offense, miss, but perhaps it would be better if a couple of our boys went to collect him, slip of a thing like you, wouldn't want to ruin that face, isn't that right, Mr. Shelby?"

Tommy smacked his lips and waited. Tessa cocked her head like it was a gun. "If you don't tell me, I'll just go find him by myself."

"I- sixth stall, but-,"

"Thank you," Tessa said, curtley, like she wasn't thankful at all. Tommy smirked and gestured to her, _by all means, _with his lit cigarette. She strode off, and her small waist was cinched in Polly's tight dress, and the other man, whatever his fucking name was, was craning his neck to look at her so tightly that Tommy was surprised it hadn't snapped. He cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows.

"She yours, sir?"

On another day, Tommy might have taught the man a lesson for asking such a question. But today he had more important things on his mind. Like rescuing a political hostage. Taking down a German gang. He inhaled his cigarette.  
"She only belongs to the horse."

Tessa came out of the stable, Sun Chaser pacing contentedly beside her. Her hair tangled with his mane and the same fire shone in their eyes. _Same hair. Same temper, _she had said. Leonard had been right. The nameless man beside him whistled.

"Well, I'll be damned. Seems like all any of us need is a woman's touch, after all."

"Maybe. Or maybe she's just better with horses," Tommy said, letting himself revel a bit in the satisfaction that came with the tense working of the man's jaw. He made a mental reminder to find out his name, and to tell Charlie to fire him. He threw his cigarette on the ground. "You and the other boys take the rest of the day off. Be back tomorrow."

Tessa gave Chase a command, and he bent his long legs and settled onto the ground with a huff. Tommy was absolutely certain she could have just hopped onto his back, but she was still irritated at the man's dismissal of her capability. She gave another word after sliding into position and Chase stood without hesitation, Tessa rocking slightly on his back, putting his ears against his head when the wind brought the strange man's scent into his nostrils.

"But sir, the cargo, there won't be anyone here to protect it in case of a-," The man started, and Tommy was beginning to lose his patience.

"I said go," Tommy told him, and Chase pawed the earth and skittered a bit underneath Tessa, stirring up dirt with his hooves. The man gave the horse one last, apprehensive glance, and touched his hat to Tommy.

"Sir," he said, and then walked briskly back towards the whitewashed stable.

Tessa grinned down at Tommy from atop her horse.

"Want to go for a ride?"


	19. Chapter 19

Tommy held the slim reins lax in one hand, the leather straps forming a cage around Tessa, who was seated in front of him. Chase did not protest the two riders, but Tommy knew the horse well enough to not be surprised. He had carried him for an entire day and night through city streets and countrysides, after all. The horse's back was warm underneath him, and Tessa's sweet, nectary smell kept wafting over him as her hair was brushed by the breeze, tickling his nose. A few inches of her porcelain skin was exposed where her neck sloped down to her shoulders, and he was trying to resist the impulse to press his mouth to it, to see if she tasted as good as she looked. A loudly buzzing bee made Chase snort and jostled Tommy closer to her.

"Easy, boy, easy. Can't be afraid of bugs, now, can we? We're soldiers, you and me," Tommy said to him in Romani, half accidentally. Tessa sucked in a breath that went directly to Tommy's cock and head.

"Where are we going?" She asked from in front of him, threading her fingers through Chase's mane. She was nervous, she had been all day, and thought she was hiding it. He let her think it. He was nervous, too, but much more practiced at keeping it down. He had existed on the scale of fear from nervous to absolutely terrified for years during the war. What was one more day of risks, against all the others he had already taken? Mostly, he was nervous for her. For her involvement. Even for her bloody father, a man he had hardly met.

Everything around them was a swirl of color, so different from the drab scheme of Heath. Green grass and blue sky and old brown fences along the dusty dirt road opened up like a woman's legs, and he wasn't calm, not really. Never quite calm. The voices never quite stopped. But they were quieter, like when he was on opium or had downed half a bottle. He wondered for a moment how long it could last, this peace, and then answered his own question. Less than twenty four hours. Tomorrow, they would be back at war.

Tommy shrugged, took a pull of the cigarette he was holding in the hands that didn't have the reins.

"Away," he said, and she didn't respond but he could feel that she agreed.

Tommy was firm and solid behind her, Chase was comfortable and familiar underneath her. She let herself relax, a little. It wouldn't be a bad last day, after all, she thought. Chase was surprisingly docile in Tommy's hands, usually it was a struggle for Tessa to keep him at under a canter. Perhaps he felt something strange about the day, too. They wandered along country lanes, passing the occasional barn, sometimes a farmhouse and once a little village. It was horrendously quaint and Tessa found the juxtaposition quite amusing, for some reason. Thomas Shelby, trotting along on a horse for hours like a grandfather with nothing better to do than that or sit on a dock and fish.

"Is this what you would do, if you didn't do what you do?" She asked him, brave because she couldn't see his face. "Aimlessly ride horses all day?"

"Less aimlessly," Tommy said, after a second. She was taken aback that he had responded.

"Really?" She asked him, trying not to let her curiosity seep into her voice and push him away.

He cleared his throat behind her, and it rumbled through his chest and against her back. "That was the plan. Before the war." He flicked some ashes off his cigarette. "Trainer. Jockey. Something like that."

She hummed, contemplative. "You would have been good."

He was quiet. Then, after so many minutes her mind had wandered and she had almost forgotten what it was they had been saying, he spoke again, and his voice had its cut edges like metal. "Even then it wasn't enough. I enlisted. Me and me brothers. We all chose it," he sucked a breath in through his teeth, "and I can never stop fucking asking myself why."

Tessa leaned back until she was resting against him, letting herself melt against the walls of iron.

"Sometimes, wars on the outside are easier to fight."

Tommy threw his dead cigarette away. "For both of our sakes tomorrow, let's hope that that's true."

They stopped at the edge of a valley lake to let Chase get a drink, Tessa peeling off her shoes and socks and hiking her borrowed dress up to wade into the water. The black material was startling against her skin, bright like stars against the night. The first lonely planets had begun to twinkle in the purple haze of the heavens, the sun slowly slipping down as it lost its grip on the day. Tommy stretched out on his back on the shore, smoking. It spiraled up against the glowing sky, wafting and then drifting away. She hated how good he looked lying down, the cut of his jaw and the angles of his face on full and audacious display. She hated how good he looked all the time. She splashed him.

"You're too much of a grand, rich man to join me, is that it?" She asked, splashing him again. He held his cigarette out to protect it from her attacks.

"There's mud," he said, without looking at her.

"Not much," she said, inspecting her bare feet through the glimmer of the water. "Come on, Thomas. It's just mud."

She realized what she had said, the importance of it, the meaning, right after she had said it, but she stood her ground. It was just mud. He sighed wearily from the shore. Smoke floated up between his lips.

"Fine. At least share your cig with me, if you're going to be a twat," she said, sloshing her way to the shore and reaching out her hand. He sat up and offered it to her, but she stood stubbornly still. He rose easily, and she wondered about his bullet holes.

"Thank you," she said, reaching for it, but at the last second, grabbing his shirt and yanking with all her might. He didn't quite topple, which was a feat, but he went knee-deep into the water, and lost his cigarette to top it off. Tessa slapped a hand over her mouth to cover her laughter. His eyes were wide and incredulous and brighter than the water, brighter than the sky, his mouth open in surprise and a shocked half smile.

"You fucking-," he lunged at her, and scooped her up like she was a kitten, and admist her squeals and protests, dunked them both into the freezing lake.


	20. Chapter 20

They lay on their backs in the field next to the lake, drying off. Chase was munching happily on the grass nearby, his tail swishing.

"Do you know any of them?" Tessa asked, gesturing to the bright stars in the sky that were beginning to pop up in earnest through the dark. Tommy exhaled smoke and then passed it to her.

"I'm gypsy. I know all of them," he said.

She tried not to be jealous of him. All she had gotten from her heritage was a last name and very red hair on her father's side, and a foot half in two worlds from her mother.

"Show me?" She asked, and he did, pointing out all the constellations in a low voice, sometimes describing the story behind them, bits and pieces of the past. She couldn't decipher half of the strange shapes he was describing, or see how anyone could think that was what the stars formed, but she let his deep voice lull her like the waves of the lake.

"That's Orion," he told her, his smooth cadence halting for the first time. "The hunter."

"And what's his story?" She asked him. She could hear him breathing, deeply. He was so warm in the cool night air that she could feel his shoulder next to hers, even though they were not touching.

"He took whatever he wanted, what wasn't meant to be his. And eventually, he was punished for it."

His voice felt heavy. She didn't think they were talking about stars anymore. She turned her head to look at him, and he looked at her, and he was so beautiful in the night, and so sad, and so broken, and so everything at once that she couldn't have put him into words if she was given ten thousand pages, couldn't have explained how she felt in that moment if she had the rest of her life to try. He blinked and she watched his dark lashes flutter, and then he moved closer and kissed her, hand cupping her face, his fingers against her cheek. There was a callous on his pointer finger from how often he held a gun. He tasted like the mint he had found and cigarettes and something sharp like ichor that was just him. He slipped his tongue into her mouth, gently, and she let him, and he pushed off of his elbow to roll on top of her, his weight pressing against her, and every point of contact between them lit up her nerves and synapses like matches striking into flame. Kissing him made her ache, in the best possible way. He felt better than vodka or whiskey, better than snow, her fingers in his hair and gripping his shirt as he moved slowly, expertly, taking his time. She rolled her hips up against him, moving her body on his, and his hand flexed momentarily on her waist in response and then he was pulling his shirt over his head, or she was, but she couldn't have cared less who was to blame, all she could wonder was why on earth it had taken this long. His hands were under her, unlacing the back of the black dress, impatient now, his mouth hot and soft on her neck, sending shivers down the backs of her legs and heat and tension clenching low in her stomach, and she melted, her hands eager and insistent and touching him everywhere, everywhere she could. Everything smelled like him and tasted like him, clean and dirty all at once, sandalwood and smoke, and she lifted her hips again, this time to let him drag the dress down off her body, and he looked at her with those eyes she wanted to fucking dive in, drown in, jump into like the lake. He ran them down her and just the way he looked at her made her wet, hovering above her, beautiful and dangerous and she couldn't wait to play with the fire, to let him do whatever it was to her that he wanted. She reached for him again, kissed him again because she dearly, dearly wanted to, wanted to make him need her just as badly as she did him, but he slid an arm around her shoulders and in one fluid motion flipped her so that she was above him, his hand snaking down between her pale thighs. When he touched her, she bit back a moan, and then failed to stifle the ones that followed, and he whispered, "Fuck," under his breath as he slipped a finger inside her, then two, using his thumb to keep stroking her and she was diging her nails into his upper back, feeling the muscles shift and flex under them, and her mouth was on his shoulder to muffle her sounds. He threaded his free hand into her loose hair and pulled her back.

"Let me hear you," he said, he commanded, his voice low, but even if he hadn't she wouldn't have had a choice because she could feel it building and it felt so, so good, she didn't think anything in the world felt as good. The crest of the wave broke, and she lost herself for several seconds, and she couldn't remember her own name but she somehow still knew his, and she thought she was probably saying it. He slipped his hand away, let her rest, kissing her lazily down her naked neck and shoulder. She let her eyes crack open, breathing hard, her body floating like it was drifting down a river, then reached down and grasped him in her palm. Tommy grunted with the unexpected pressure. She could feel him throbbing in her hand and smiled a bit at his thickness. Of course he had a nice cock. At least that explained where some of the arrogance came from. She sat up in his lap, pulled him with her, hovered, waited. Her chest rose and fell unevenly, and she should have been scared, perhaps, should have been hesitant, should have told him she couldn't do this with a man who had put a bullet in as many men as women he had been inside. But she didn't. She put her other hand up to his face, felt the breath blow out warm through his parted lips, the constant, fearless challenge in his bright blue eyes, the lines of his cheeks and jaw. His skin was warm, the bullet holes healing but still angry and red, slights on his perfection. She wanted to ask him where every scar had come from, she wanted to know all his stories, knew he would never tell her. He closed his eyes against her touch and she kissed him, softly, like a whispered confession, and slid him inside her, just barely. The ocean eyes cracked open and he said something in Romani, and then,

"You asked me what I am."

She pulled back to look at him, to let him look at her. They, and the world, were still, for a moment. Her father's words, ones that felt so long ago, now, echoed back to her. _A predator, _he had said. He had warned her. And Tommy made her pray, in that single, frozen moment, to a God she didn't believe in, just one word. _Please. _

She didn't say anything. She took a deep breath and slid down onto him, slowly, their eyes locked, her breathing and heartbeat stopped like just another deer at the end of a gun, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and felt him move inside of her.

"Yours," he told her, deep and low, his hand on the back of her neck, and for a moment it looked like the steel walls behind his eyes were torn down, he was looking at her like she was the only thing that existed in the entire world, and she thought she might not even make it to tomorrow and all her worries would have been for nothing, because her head and her heart felt like they were going to explode right then and there, and suddenly, she wondered if she had been wrong about who had hunted who.


	21. Chapter 21

They lay together, after, panting and sweaty, both their heads swimming like the galaxies above through the sky. Tessa was focusing on coming back down to Earth for the second time, and Tommy was smirking a little behind his cigarette, but his eyes were crinkling like they did when he really smiled. They both stared up into the sky, their breathing, the distant lapping of the waves on the lake's edges, and the very faint swishing of Chase's tail the only noises in the night. He could see her hair in his peripheral vision, so vivid that the color stood out even in the dark, and her coppery waves were sticking to her neck, and she lifted her arms to gather it up in her hands, and the moonlight caught her bare breasts in a way that made Tommy want to ask if she wanted another go. He contented himself with taking another deep drag and watching her. The smoke tickled the back of his throat as he blew it out through his nose.

Neither of them slept much that night, finally slipping off in the early hours of the morning, as the sun crept tentatively back over the hills. Instead, they talked, or rather, Tessa talked and let Tommy listen. He was a good listener. She told him about her father, because if they both got killed by Germans, she wanted someone out there to know what kind of man he had been. She told him about growing up in America, she told him that she loved to write, that she preferred coffee over tea but all anyone drank in England was tea so she had had to resign herself to it. She told him about her brother, how he had died in the war, how her grandfather's memory had slipped away until he was nearly empty by the end, how her mother had been so crushed by the death of her son and father in the same year that she crawled into a hole of champagne and never came back out.

"Champagne is for celebrating, usually. I think she found it rather ironic," Tessa said, her eyes dry but an expression on her face like her heart was still bleeding, like it would never really stop. Tommy didn't think she wanted his sympathy, so he didn't give it. He chain smoked and she talked because he thought she probably wanted someone who understood, and he did. He understood the snow, now, too. Why she was self destructive enough to be drawn to him, to risk her life breaking a stranger out of a hospital. Why the only thing she loved was a horse that couldn't drink itself to death or lose all its memories or volunteer to get blown up in a war. Eventually, she went quiet, and then she said, "Thank you," in a quiet voice. He passed her his cigarette, and she took it.

"If I ask you something, will you tell me?" She asked him. She passed him the smoke back.  
"Depends what it is," he said.

"Why don't you ever tell anyone anything about yourself?"

He snorted. "That's what you want to know?"

"Yes." Her small chin was set defiantly.

He breathed out. "Knowledge is power. The more people know about you, the more they can use it against you. That's why I don't tell people things. That, and I just don't fucking like it."

"Do you want to know what I think?"

He rolled his eyes. "You're going to tell me anyway," he said, around his cigarette.

"I think," she continued, like she hadn't heard him, "that being afraid of nothing and being afraid of everything are the same thing."

He pulled another breath in, looked at her. Her large grey-green eyes, her fine nose, her lovely mouth. "Maybe," he told her. Then he pointed at her with the cigarette. "I should have known you wanted to be a writer. Always saying shit like that."

She slapped his hand, laughing. A few sparks trailed from the edge of the smoke and landed in the grass, their orange glows slowly disappearing, one by one.

The ride back to the stables was very quiet. Tessa couldn't find any words and doubted Thomas would want to hear them anyway. His face was closed again, his eyes sharp and endless. Chase could feel the tension of his riders, and was pulling at the reins and balking at every possible obstruction, his tail held high in the foggy morning air like a banner. Tommy slid off from his spot behind Tessa to walk next to the horses' head so that he could lead him, and talked to him quietly now and then when his spirit acted up, but did not say much to her. She couldn't hear what it was he was saying to Chase, or what language it was in. She couldn't tell what he was thinking, or feeling, or if he was thinking or feeling at all, or just acting. Just impulses, just nerves, just the need to survive. A soldier. Other than a tightness in his shoulders, and his silence, he seemed perfectly normal. Like this was any other day. She supposed that was his best technique, out of all of them. No matter what, let nothing get to the surface. Let none of the cracks show.

She was not a solider. She had never been in a battle, she had never fought in a war, and even hearing the low sound of his voice made her want to cry because all she could think about was never hearing it again for whatever reason and never seeing her father again because the moment they saw her they just shot her on sight and never never never. She was exhausted and everything felt like too much, everything was too much, Thomas was like that, everything, all the time, all at once. She didn't blame him for it. She tried not to, anyway. It was what drew her to him. It wasn't his fault she had fallen for him, although he certainly hadn't helped. With his eyes and his guns and his every once in a while almost-smiles. She circled back to thinking about her father. And then to Tommy, and then her father, and then the Germans, until her head was spinning and her stomach was clenching. She slid off of Chase's back and went to crouch by the long grass at the side of the road. Tommy stopped the horse with a gentle "Whoa," watching her but not asking what she was doing. Tessa closed her eyes to try to stop the nausea, but that just made it worse, so she just leaned on her knees and breathed through her nose and tried to fight down the awful, terrible, anxious feeling and to fight down the vomit but in the end, the vomit won. She managed to get her hair out of the way, at least. She jumped a little when she felt a hand on her back. She hadn't heard him walk over. She didn't want to look at him. She didn't want him to see her like this, weak and shaky and uncomposed. His hand was large and warm on her shoulder. She stared out in front of her, at the little hills and valleys they had been passing. There were birds chirping. It seemed impossible that the rest of the day would ever, could ever happen.

"Arthur got sick every time before a fight for years,'' Tommy said, his voice low, crouched down at her side. She was surprised at how soft he was being with her.

"But you didn't," she said.

"No," he told her. Then, "I got sick after." He waited a moment, both of them looking out past the trees and the grass. Then he stood and offered her his hand. She took it, and they walked back to the stables together, on either side of Chase.

When they returned to the house at Watery Lane, Polly was the only one there, sitting in the betting room and writing in a large, leather bound book. She looked up as they entered, but back down at the book when she addressed Thomas.

"And where have you been?"

"Out," he said, smoke drifting out with his voice. He ashed his cigarette and put his hand in his pocket, pulled out his watch and checked the time.

"And it didn't occur to you that there might have been a better time for you to go "out" than the night before a heist?" Polly asked, closing her book forcefully, looking up and taking in their appearances. Yesterday's clothes. Tessa's wild hair.

"I don't need your permission, Polly."

She scoffed. "It's not about my permission, it's about me knowing where you bloody are!"

Tommy put his smoke in his mouth and raised both hands as if to say "Well, here I am". "And now you know. Now, if you'll excuse me, someone said something important might be happening today." He pulled on his hat and caught Tessa's eye before leaving again, but she couldn't see past his sharp features and impenetrable eyes to discern any meaning besides that he was going away and not telling her where or why. Just like Polly, who was throwing her hands in the air as the door shut behind Tommy and saying "Jesus Christ".

"It is somewhat comforting to know he is that difficult all the time," Tessa said out loud before really considering it. When she looked up, Polly was studying her.

"Try impossible. Tommy does what he wants when he wants to," Polly said. Tessa met her stare. "Which is including you, now."

Tessa wanted to blush but didn't think her blood was warm enough that morning. She said nothing, which was an admittance. Polly lit a cigarette, still looking at her. "He's not a good man," she said. Like Tessa didn't know.

"Great men are rarely good," Tessa said, fighting off an overpowering desire for her white powder. Polly's dark eyes scanned her in the same way her nephew's did.

"So you're in love with him, then."

There it was. Tessa sat down in the chair across from her, put her arms on the table, and her head down on top of them. It was unladylike and immature and she could not have given less of a fuck. The worn wood was soft under her hands. She heard Polly take a drag and exhale, and looked up.

"It could be worse," Polly said, after one last, contemplative pause. "You could be a communist. We've had that happen before."

"I could be," Tessa said, half heartedly. "How do you know I'm not?"

Polly chucked, dryly. "Because you're Tommy's."


	22. Chapter 22

An hour later, there was a knock at the door, and Tessa opened it to admit Tommy again. He took the cigarette out of his mouth to speak, standing in the hall halfway in the door like he was about to leave even though he had only just arrived.

"It's time," he said, pulling out his golden watch and checking the time, not meeting Tessa's eyes. She found herself nodding anyway, like she was a marionette on a string, her chin tugged up and down by some higher power.

"Can I please have some snow now?" She asked, a feeble attempt at a joke, but Tommy's eyes snapped up to hers, almost glowing cold blue, like looking at the sun shining through a glacier. He sucked in his cigarette, handed it to her.

"Have this instead. You'll be driving in your own car, pretend to go shopping by yourself. It'll be conspicuous, but hopefully the Germans will be too excited about the abduction opportunity to focus much on that," he reviewed. They had already established this plan, a hundred times over, and Tessa would have been mildly offended by his lack of trust in her r if she didn't know who she was talking to. Thomas Shelby trusted no one but himself. "The Lees will be on lookout, they'll send a signal once the Germans pick you up, which they will know to do because we have the man on the inside who'll tip 'em off. We'll follow you to wherever you're taken at a safe distance, then my boys will make something go bang, the Jews will swarm, and we'll come get you and your father out." He lit another cigarette. His hands were completely steady.

"A safe distance," Tessa muttered wryly, taking a deep pull of the smoke Tommy had passed her. To her surprise, he lifted a hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, an expression resembling gentleness softening his relentless lines.

"They won't get a chance to lay a hand on you. I'll make sure of it," he said, and he kissed her, and she held on to it like the moment would stretch on forever, like she could still live in it even if she ended up getting a bullet to the head. His lips were plush and his mouth was warm and she kissed him back, the cut of his jaw sharp under her palms when she lifted her hands to his face. When he pulled back, she found herself speaking before it had even registered that that was something she had intended to do.

"Tommy, if anything goes wrong today, I just-," she began. His eyes flashed sharply at her, a threat, a warning. The power he possessed to silence people with a glance. She supposed it was one part of the reason he had gotten to where he was from where he had started. He shook his head ever so slightly, reached into his pocket and pulled something out that flashed like his eyes just had.

"You can't carry a gun, because they'd find it and know something was off. But-," he presented the scalpel to her, the one he had had since the night at the hospital that had changed everything, "in case anything goes wrong."

Tessa didn't remember driving to the busy streets outside of the tailors shops and clothing stores. Suddenly she was just there, taking in the mundane scene, observing the minutiae of daily activity, steeling herself to leave the car. People milled about, carrying on with their lives and their errands, filtering in and out of the shops, chattering and clattering, alive with life and consumed completely by their petty concerns. She had been one of them, a few weeks ago. Closer to them, anyway. She closed her eyes and was struck by a vivid image of her brother's gap-toothed grin from when they were children, playing in the sand on a beach. Her mother, laughing as she held her morning coffee, always letting Tessa have a sip. Her grandfather reading her a bedtime story. Her father, walking a young Chase out of the stable, a red bow around his chestnut neck and a huge grin across her father's face. An empty box covered in a flag. A broken bottle of champagne on the floor. A face she had seen her entire life that no longer knew her. A desperate plea to a man with a face and heart and mind like a blade and eyes like gemstones. She opened her eyes, gripped the scalpel in the pocket of her dress, and opened the door of her gleaming car.

She walked as slowly as was casually passable, stopping to peer into the shop windows, pretending to observe the dresses on display but really not seeing any farther past her pale expression reflected in the glass. She watched her lashes as she blinked, the blush of her lips, the bright, gleaming waves of her hair. She couldn't hear the noise around her, everything was disjointed and far off, like the world was being drowned by the crashing waves of the ocean. And then a man appeared in the reflection behind her, and their eyes caught for a moment. His were a dark brown. She wondered if they would be the last she ever saw. His gun glimmered in the reflection, peeking out from its holster.

"Tessa Reilly. Why don't you come with me," he said, and it wasn't a question. He grasped her upper arm tightly, spun her around. She offered no resistance. She saw a small girl holding the hand of her mother pass by right in front of them, heard the briefest flash of their conversation, a car horn honk in the distance, saw a sparrow fly overhead. The day was grey and overcast, threatening rain. From around the corner of a shop, she thought she saw a long black barrel, behind the washed stone, and the maniacal grin of a man, but she blinked and he and his gun were gone. She didn't know if he was on her side. She didn't know what "her side" really was. She didn't know if she had even really seen him. The German man led her to the street, to a large car that was idling, it's motor thrumming even over the buzz of the city. He fastened ropes over her crossed wrists, and she stared resolutely ahead, past him, out across the street, like she wasn't there at all. All of those people around them, and not one gave a second glance. She tried to think of what Tommy would do, how he would act. Eyes flat, face closed. No fear, no emotion. The German opened the rear car door and revealed two more of his comrades, dressed in all black.

"After you," he said, and he shoved her in, climbing into the driver's seat and speeding away.


	23. Chapter 23

Tommy was wrestling with the compulsion to check his watch, like that would give him any of the information he actually needed to know. All he could do for the moment was sit. Wait. Fuck sitting and waiting. _They should have taken her by now. If they didn't, Solomon's man fell through, or they killed her on sight, but if they had done that, the Lees would have contacted us by now, like they were instructed to, or the police-, _

"'Bout time to go, eh, Tom?" Arthur asked from the passenger seat of the car, clenching his hat in his wringing hands. Tommy thought he was lucky to not have picked a hat with a peaky brim, because his fingers would have been cut to ribbons by now. Tommy took the last drag of his cigarette, flicked it.

"About time, yeah," he said, and as he said it, Finn walked out of the front doors of the pub they were parked by. He lifted two fingers, his young face set. "And that's the signal." He turned the engine over, and it woke with a sputter. "Let's go get those fucking German bastards."

They had put a rough cloth gag in Tessa's mouth so that he couldn't speak, tied it around her head, kept her wrists tied together. She was close to choking, and the ropes were rubbing sharply against her skin, but she was alive. For now. She wondered which of her current companions was meant to be Tommy's inside man, and if that would make a difference if one of the others pulled a gun and decided to do away with their cargo. The men were silent, their conversation limited to a few clipped words in German. Tessa couldn't see any cars following behind them, and she knew that technically, that should be a comfort, but somehow still wasn't. She half wished to see a car in the rearview, Tommy driving up behind her, so that she could throw herself out and change her mind. But there would be no rescue on the journey. Otherwise the plan would fall apart. Otherwise she would never get to see her father again. Tessa stared down at her shoes, peeking out underneath her slate grey dress. A dress the same color of the sky that day, ominous and stormy. _I will keep myself together. For my father, I will keep myself together. _The car smelled strongly of corned beef, for whatever reason, and there was a crack in the windshield, and it was the identifying of these details that Tessa clung to as they drove out of the city, leaving the monochrome landscape behind. They drove, and drove, and drove on.

By the time, whatever it was, that the large German car rolled to a screeching stop, the rain had started to fall in earnest. Tessa had tried to approximate how long they had been driving, she guessed perhaps an hour, maybe a little longer, but she had no idea where it was in that vicinity away from Birmingham that she had been taken. Closer to London, but that was no surprise. The German who had grabbed her at the shops pulled her roughly from the car, but didn't cover her eyes, which Tessa knew was a bad sign. They didn't care if she saw where they were because they never meant for her to leave this place alive. She could see a farmhouse through the haze of mist and drizzle, large and battered, three imposing stories but looking like it had seen better days, the shutters hanging haphazardly from the windows. There were no other houses nearby, just trees and overgrown grass. She tried to peer back down the dirt road they had driven in on, but the German yanked her head back around again, pulling sharply on her hair.

"Hey! Watch your eyes," he said, and she winced as he let go of her scalp. "Get her inside," he commanded to the two others, both of whom gave him a salute. He got back into the car, drove off. An officer or a higher up, not one to deal with mere prisoners. Tessa looked back at the house again. _Let my father be here. Please, god, let my father be here. _The two men each took one of her arms, looking rather like they thought doing so was overkill. Her hands were still tied in front of her, her mouth gagged, the scalpel weighing down her right inside pocket ever so slightly. They frog-marched her up to the front door. One of the men, the scrawnier of the two, was incredibly twitchy, and his hands kept fluttering on her arm. No, not fluttering. Tapping. She did everything in her power not to let the realization show on her face. Morse code. She had learned it during a summer off of school, when loneliness and boredom had no other antidotes besides such trivial pursuits. Not so trivial now.

_The Jews are coming. The Jews are coming. The Jews are coming. _Were they?

The house was empty on the inside, its remaining furniture sparse and partially destroyed. An end table lay on its side in the foyer, dust covered the patterned tiles on the floor. A staircase led up, and another, past an open door, crept down into darkness like a living thing, a snake slithering back into it's hole. The men led her upstairs, and she tripped a little on the hem of her dress as they drug her forward, trying and failing to calm her erratic breathing. Past an old, abandoned washroom, past a bedroom she only caught a glimpse of a broken old four poster bed of inside, down the hall they went, only the murky outdoor light shining in through glass windows, yellowed and warped with age, to light the way. _Who lived here? _She wondered. _Whose ghosts deserve to witness such violence? _She thought of Tommy. She thought of her father. Her footsteps fumbled again.

"Get up," the German who was actually a German and not an undercover Jew barked, yanking on her arm. She did. "We've got someone for you to meet." And grabbed a key from his belt with his other hand, put it in the lock of the door in front of them, and swung it open. Tessa's mouth would have dropped if she hadn't still been gagged.

"Hello, Tessa," said Ada Shelby, softly, from inside the room.


	24. Chapter 24

Arthur stood in the phone box, speaking gruffly and shifting agitatedly, and Tommy stood outside, hand in one pocket, smoking. The rain was slipping down his collar, and he pulled his hat down lower, over his eyes.

"Alright. Alright, Johnny. You did good. Farmhouse southeast, quarter mile. Yeah, we got them, they're all here. Get your boys out of here, your job's done. Will do." He hung up the phone and clambered out. Tommy waited for him to speak, prompting through silence. "The Lee scouts followed them outside Oxford. Got us the address." His rough voice slipped over the syllables. He glimpsed behind Tommy, at the boxvan filled with hidden Peaky Blinders in the back, all clutching rifles and pistols. The phone rang again. "Fucking hell," Arthur muttered, wrenching the door open again and grabbing the receiver. "What?"

His face changed. Tommy saw it, the way it did in the war when the whistles blew to send them over the top. "What? Polly, slow down-," his voice floated out of the still-open door. Tommy's body felt clenched, coiled. The rain pattered on the box's roof, on the ground. "Who did?" The brother's eyes met through the raindrop splattered glass of the telephone box door. "It's okay, Pol. It's okay. We'll find her."

He stepped out, his shiny black shoe sloshing into a puddle of runny brown mud. His eyes were wide and frantic, but he spoke slowly. "They took her, Tommy. They took our Ada."

Ada Shelby had a black eye blooming and a split in her lip. Her hands were tied like Tessa's, but behind the chair she was sitting in, and she was missing a shoe. Her expensive gold dress was ripped, but it didn't look like the rip was because of men. Odd that that was the detail Tessa's mind should focus on. Small miracles.

"Ada? What are you doing here?" Tessa's voice was completely muffled from the gag, and she was becoming frantic. Where was her father? Where was Tommy?

"Oh, you two know each other, do you?" The German said, suspiciously.

"Went to school together," Ada lied easily. Her ankles were tied as well, Tessa could see the burn from the rope where Ada had tried to kick herself free. The German spit on the floor, pushed past Tessa to cross the room, making her stumble, and slapped Ada across the face. She yelped.

"Beck, get a chair. Tie her to it," he said, pointing at the undercover Jew, then at Tessa. "You," he said, yanking the gag out of her mouth, "go ahead and scream, now. Nobody will hear you."

She didn't, but she sucked in large gasps of oxygen, grateful to no longer have the damp, suffocating rag in her mouth. The German man looked disappointed at her lack of hysteria. He got closer to her, leaned into her face, his brows furrowed low. "You should be screaming," he said. "You would be, if you had any idea what we're going to do with you." Tessa's bound hands were clenched into shaking fists. She did not scream. She did not speak. She spat in his face.

"Tessa," Ada said softly, but Tessa wasn't sure what she was trying to convey. The man leaned back, wiped his face with his hand, and chuckled gently, leaned back out of her space. He had a thin pencil mustache and violence in his eyes. Tessa wished he had hit her instead of laughing. It would have scared her less. The Jewish man, Beck, returned with the chair, and sat Tessa down in it without looking her in the eyes. She had no way to communicate with him while the other German was in the room. He tied her to it with ropes, tightly, tighter than she felt he should, given that they were meant to be allies. Her ankles were bound as well, in the same manner as Ada's. When he was done, the German came back over to inspect his work.

"Tighter, you fucking idiot. You want them to escape, huh?" He spat, and Beck meekly complied, until the ropes were so tight it was cutting off Tessa's circulation in her hands and feet. The German checked his watch. "Arnholt will be returning soon," he said, addressing Beck. "Guard the door. Do not let them out. Do not let anyone else in. Is that clear?" Beck nodded, and Tessa realized she had yet to hear him speak. The German gave her one last, chilling look, and then strode to the door and disappeared into the hallway. Beck followed, and moved to a guard position outside of the room, shutting the door behind him. Tessa waited until she was certain the German's footsteps had faded out of earshot, and then spoke frantically.

"Ada, how the _fuck _did they get you? Why are you here? Where is my father?!" The terror in her voice made it rise.

"Shh!" Ada snapped, then gentled, seeing the wideness of Tessa's eyes, the jerky rise and fall of her chest. They were tied facing each other, with two or three feet of space between them. "They grabbed me right outside of London. Tommy had me spending a couple of days there, for business. Probably to try to keep me away from all this," she sighed. "They must have followed me out of Birmingham, because they were on me the moment I got to the city."

Tessa nodded, not really processing any of her words. "So where is he now? Where is Tommy?"

Ada bit her lip, and then winced because of the split down the middle. "I don't know."

Tessa's breathing stopped. "He doesn't know you're here." The truth was rushing in, a broken dam, broken hope. "If he finds out you're missing, he'll try to find you. But he doesn't know they brought you here."

Ada realized Tessa's meaning before she said it. "He'll come, Tess. He'll still come for you, and he'll find us. And even if he doesn't, he has help, he has friends-," Tessa trusted the faceless Solomons and his silent inside man about as far as she could throw them.

"There's a scalpel in my pocket. Cut me free," Tessa said, meeting Ada's eyes so that she could see that Tessa was serious, would not sit and wait for a rescue that was, at this point and in her opinion, about as likely as finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

"Wait, Tessa-," Ada said, and Tessa cut her off.

"If Tommy is made to choose between saving you and saving me, who do you think he's going to go looking for?" She asked, what little patience she had completely run out. Adrenaline was flowing through her veins.

"Tommy isn't stupid. He'll still come, he'll figure it out. And I was _going to say,_" Ada continued in a sharp tone that reminded Tessa of what family she was from. "that I thought you might want to know, your father is here."


	25. Chapter 25

Tommy sat in the driver's seat of his black Bugatti, his hands clenched so tightly around the steering wheel he wouldn't have been surprised if he was warping the metal. He punched the wheel with the side of his fist, once, twice, as hard as he could, causing the horn to blare, intermingling with his hoarse yell.  
"FUCK! FUCK." He turned to Arthur, desperately. "How did this happen? How could this have happened?"

Arthur was mindlessly toying with his gun, flipping the safety on and off, on and off. "Our men say they got her in London. They tried to follow them but got pulled over by some coppers once they were out of the city, out of our jurisdiction." He flipped the safety.

"Where is she? Where would they have taken her?" Arthur was breathing sharply, but didn't respond.

"We have to find her, Tommy," was all he said, his eyes gazing off into the distance, looking glazed. Tommy reached out and backhanded him in the face, not hard enough to cause damage, but enough to rattle his sense loose. "Arthur. Stay with me. Which way were they heading when they took her?"

"North, they said," Arthur told him, working his sore jaw but not reproaching Tommy for the slap.

"We'll find her," Tommy said, his mind racing, his eyes following the paths of the rain on the windows.

"What about Tessa, Tommy? What about the plan?"

Tommy met his eyes, cold, unforgiving.

"I told you. Find our sister."

"He's here? Where? How do you know?" Tessa pelted Ada with questions like the raindrops pinging on the outside of the windows. The room they were in seemed like it was probably a bedroom, once, but now was completely barren except for the two young women tied to rickety chairs.

"He's in the basement. I heard them talking about him before they went to get you. I know some German, picked it up for diplomacy purposes." Her mouth warped a bit, like in another life, she would have found the irony amusing.

"I have to get to him," Tessa said, her mind blank.

"Tessa. There are at least thirteen men in this building, maybe more. All armed. Don't be daft," Ada said sharply, as if that would make Tessa change her mind. Tessa shook her head, aggressively.

"I have a knife. You could reach it. Cut me loose."

"You are going to get yourself _killed," _Ada hissed, but the door creaked open and Tessa's retort was silenced. Beck's dark head poked through the crack, and he spoke with an accent Tessa couldn't quite place.

"Quiet! They'll be back any minute, they're going to hear you," he said, looking about as frantic as Tessa felt. She did not think this was a good thing.

"Where are the others?" Ada prompted him, clearly trying to keep the desperation out of her voice, keep herself clear and calm, but the Jewish man's face changed and so did hers. "The rest of your men are coming, right? Tommy said you had a deal."

"They're coming," he said, his mouth set in a line. "But not until the Blinders thin out the herd. Solomons said to wait until the Peaky boys had no choice but to intervene. Didn't want to be on the front lines."

"I thought the Blinders were only supposed to cause a diversion," Tessa said. The man winced.

"A diversion can only last so long. Eventually, they will be caught and forced to engage, or come here and be forced to engage. Either way, we have help only after Solomons knows it won't be his men that will be sacrificed."

"Fuck," Tessa said. Her numb hands were sweating. "Fuck. There may not be a diversion at all. Tommy probably sent his men to look for you instead," she looked at Ada. "The Jews will never come."

Ada's face turned white. Tessa wriggled her wrists in their vice grip. "Beck! Untie me. We have to go, we have to get out of here."

"You can't get out of here," he said, like she was insane. She probably was. "And I can't untie you, they'll know it was me." She wanted to kick him for his lack of spine, and she cursed her tied feet, her useless, burning wrists. Beck's head snapped back around the peeling paint of the doorframe.

"They're coming back. Be quiet!" He hissed, retreating again, closing the door. Within a few moments, Tessa too could hear the footsteps approaching, first on the stairs, then down the hall. The German man who had apprehended her in the square entered again. His large hands were encased in sharp brown leather gloves, which he peeled off slowly, inspecting the women's faces.

"Hello again, Miss Reilly. I apologize for not introducing myself earlier, we were on a bit of a schedule. My name is Richard Arnholt." His gaze turned to Ada. "And Miss Shelby. Always a pleasure."

"My name is Thorne," Ada said, but it sounded a bit tired, her voice smaller than Tessa had ever heard it.

"Ah. Of course. The one who sleeps with communists. How did that conversation go with your brother, I wonder? I was sorry to hear of your husband's passing. Perhaps Thomas Shelby was not so sorry." He narrowed his eyes at her, a smirk forming on his face. "Perhaps he was not sorry at all. Pestilence, they said. How curious."

Ada's mouth dropped open in anger. "You _dare _accuse my brother of-,"

"Was I accusing?" Arnhold inspected his pristine fingernails. "Although, if I were, would it really be so far-fetched? His sins, after all, are legend."

Ada returned nothing but furious silence. Arnholt crossed the room and crouched down in front of her. "Such a lovely young thing. Such a pity, to be wasted on the memory of a dead communist." He reached out and stroked her cheek. "As for you, Miss Reilly," he said, addressing her but not turning away from Ada's bruised face. "We have your father."

Tessa remembered to try to appear shocked about this, but wanted to slice Arnholt's face, to take the finger he was laying on Ada off with her scalpel, so she was relatively sure the only expression she managed was pure contempt.

"Unfortunately," Arnholt continued, "he has promised to be most uncooperative if he discovers his precious daughter has come to any harm, so we have graciously decided to abide by his wishes." He paused. "For now. Until it benefits us to act otherwise." He ran another gloved finger down Ada's cheek. Tessa could see her shoulders trembling. "However, we have no such restrictions when it comes to you, Miss _Shelby._"

"No," Tessa whispered. Ada whimpered slightly, her eyes glimmering, her chin set. She was struggling with her ropes again, despite the burns around her ankles. Arnholt drew a knife from his coat pocket and sliced the binds tying her to the chair, keeping her hands and feet restricted, and yanked her to her feet. She started struggling immediately, so much so that Arnholt nearly lost his firm grip on her, despite his bulk.

"My brothers will fucking _destroy _you if you so much as touch me," she said, hitting his chest and his arms with her bound wrists, "I will fucking kill you myself, you bastard, get your filthy hands off of me-,"

Arnhold laughed at her. "I think it is much more likely that me touching you destroys them," he said, and he began hauling her out of the room, looking Tessa in the eyes as he did so, like he was telling her she was next.

"Ada!" Tessa screeched, trying to bounce her chair, to break it's legs, to somehow, magically, please escape the ropes like burning wires, "No! Ada!" She caught a glimpse of the other girl's face as the German dragged her out of her room, her dark hair swinging in front of her eyes as she writhed, her mouth open in a scream. "Tommy's coming, Ada! It'll be okay! Ada! Let go of her, you cunt!"

The door slammed behind them, and Tessa was left alone, sobbing into an empty room with nothing but rotting floorboards and spiderwebs as witness.

Tessa was shaking so badly her teeth were chattering. She listened to Ada's screams fade, and wanted to vomit again, but there was nothing in her stomach. _He won't come, _she thought, desperate, petrified, despite what she had just tried to convince Ada of. The room was cold, the rain pouring down outside the miserable, horrible house, where her father was, somewhere, where her friend was, about to have unspeakable things done to her. Tessa looked down at her wrists. They had started to leak blood onto the lap of her grey dress. She took a shuddering, gasping breath, her salty tears falling into her open mouth, dripping down her face. And she began rocking the chair, back and forth, until she collapsed on her side, hands bound, and she pressed her body weight onto the back of her left thumb, pressed and pressed and pressed. She thought of Tommy's grip on her wrist, eons ago, in the hospital, how easy it had seemed like it would have been for him to shatter her bones with just one hand. _Go ahead and scream, _they had told her. She did. Her thumb snapped.

Tommy sped down a road, pistol in one hand. Arthur sped down another, a van full of men behind him. John yelled into a telephone, screamed for his sister, sent out coppers and Blinders and everyone, anyone he could, Esme's pale face like a ghost behind him. Polly clutched her black Madonna, Tessa clutched her broken thumb, Ada bit a man's hand until she drew blood. The rain poured on.


	26. Chapter 26

She wiggled and tugged and pulled, biting through her lip to distract herself from the pain with new pain, and the ropes slipped off her wrist. Tessa laughed. Why she found it funny, she couldn't say. She looked at her unbound wrists for a moment, just a split second, realized she had never truly appreciated them before. Her fingers, the freedom they gave her. She reached into her dress with her good hand, closing around the cold steel of the scalpel, drawing it out. She could see her own reflection in it, briefly, blood dripping from her lip, an even brighter red than her hair. She hacked at the ropes at her ankles, and if she cut herself in the process, she didn't notice. She stood. She walked to the door, and with all of her anger and pain, she started to kick.

It shuddered in it's frame, the old lock creaking. She kicked again, and aimed badly, sending a jolt of pain up her leg like it was her shin and not her thumb that had broken. She kicked again. She kept seeing Ada's face. The wood cracked, she kicked, it splintered, she kicked, a hole big enough for her to climb through. She shoved past it, her dress catching on the rough edges, ran right to the abandoned bedroom with the broken bed, ran right into Arnholt's bare chest, as he emerged to investigate the noise.

He hit her in the side of his head, his nostril's flaring like a bull's. She could see the whites in his eyes, the flashing, repulsive male anger. How dare she interrupt him. How dare she prevent him from invading, from violating, from destroying. She realized she could kill this man, if she found a way to, without a second thought. She didn't get the chance, his hand slammed into her again, his voice screaming in her ears, ringing like her head was a bell, knocking the scalpel, her one, tiny weapon, out of her hands. His hand wrapped around her throat. Just like at the hospital. Would she do things differently, she wondered, knowing what she did now? Would she walk out on Thomas Shelby, let him get shot in his hospital bed, if she could go back? She thought of Arthur's gentle eyes, Ada curled up asleep by the fire, Polly sharing her gin, John playing with his youngest son. And most of all, she thought of Tommy's eyes, brilliant, dazzling. The German kept screaming, kept squeezing. And suddenly she didn't see Arnholt anymore, but it was Tommy instead, and they were in his bedroom on Watery Lane, and he was kissing her and she was safe and it was so nice she thought the rest of the world was fading, like she was fading, too, like she was floating away…

A blurry figure emerged from behind the man who was killing her, lifted something, and swung hard. Arnholt went down, and Tessa went with him, dropping to the floor, gasping, her airway crushed, her lungs desperately trying to inflate, her head and eyes unfocused. The shape was kicking, and kicking, and kicking. Ada put her one remaining shoe through Arnholt's eye socket, and then she did it again, and again, until the heel was painted in blood. The world before Tessa's eyes came slowly back into focus, and she saw a girl in an empty hallway, with tear tracks on her face, looking like she was wearing one red stocking. Tessa struggled to sit up. Ada was gasping. The moment felt drawn out, sticky and slow like toffee, like every second was stretched out into a hundred, a thousand. Her scalpel was glinting slightly on the worn wooden floor where it had fallen, and she snatched it, clung to it.

"We have… to go," Tessa said, and her throat felt like it had been ripped out by wolves. "The other Germans… will come."

"He sent them away. He said he wanted it to be just me and him." Ada said, like a shell-shocked soilder. Her eyes looked blank.

"Ada. We've got... to go," Tessa said, again. Ada nodded, mutely, and Tessa doubted she had heard a word. She was staring at Arnholt's decimated face. Or the place where his face had been. Tessa pulled herself to a crouch, then, slowly, to her feet. The hallway tilted. She placed a hand on the wall to steady herself, and took Ada's hand. She noticed Ada's dress was ripped now, completely, nearly falling off of her.

"Ada, come on. We have to go."

They stumbled together, down the hallway, down the stairs. Tessa was fighting the encroaching darkness on the edge of her vision. She stopped at the top of the staircase that led down, into the basement, her abrupt movement jerking Ada back by their clasped hands.

"My father," she said, blindly. "I have to get my father." Ada's eyes were wide, petrified. "Go," Tessa said. "Go. I'll catch up to you." It was a lie. They both knew it.

"Tessa, you won't make it out of here with him," Ada said, her voice returning, but the fear in her eyes the same.

"Then I won't make it out," she said. "And I won't let you sacrifice yourself for me."

Ada's lip trembled.

"Tommy could do worse than you," she said, and she grabbed Tessa in a hug. "I'll find help. I'm going to get you out of here. I promise."

Tessa buried her face in Ada's hair. Somehow, past the blood and sweat and tears, she still smelled like lavender. "Go. Get yourself safe." And Tessa let go and threw herself down the stairs, two at a time, not looking back, because she knew if she did, she would leave with her.

The basement was really more of a cellar, it's walls made of stone, musty and dank and almost completely dark. Small windows laid into the house's foundation, just above ground, let in small patches of dim blue light, the dark sky and approaching night making Tessa squint in the darkness. That, and her vision was still blurry, going in and out like a pictureshow. There was a door on the right side of the room, its outline hazy, and she stumbled to it, her thumb throbbing, her legs shaky. The basement was even colder than the rest of the house, and for the moments it took her to cross the room, she could see her breath floating in front of her, smoke from the lungs of a dragon. The hem of her dress flashed in front of her as she started to kick, again, and it was red from trailing through Arnholt's blood. She thanked the old house, and it's crumbling foundation, because the door gave way after only two kicks, as she wasn't sure she could have managed many more. Her head spun with the exertion, and she couldn't see into the room, couldn't tell if she had just plunged herself into a dark cellar for no reason other than to have chosen her own scene of execution. She moved past the door, hanging off it's rusted hinges.

"Dad?" She called out, her voice hoarse, her heart clenching.


	27. Chapter 27

"Tessa?" A voice responded, in the darkness. She choked back a sob, relief flooding through her like novocaine.

"It's me. I'm here," she said, hobbling slightly as she walked blindly further into the dark. "Where are you?"

"Tessa," the voice said again, that familiar voice. But she had never heard it sound like this, not even when she ran out onto the street when she was seven and was almost run over by a carriage. The fear in it cut her like the scalpel. "You shouldn't be here. How did they find you? Are you hurt?"

"It's okay, dad, I'm okay. I'm not hurt," she said, as the pain in her thumb shot all the way up through her arm. She followed the sound of his voice through the dark, her eyes adjusting slightly, slowly. There was something on the wall with a different texture, something that gleamed ever so slightly. Chains. She moved closer to them, almost blind, feeling her way, her good hand tracing the rough stone of the wall. She could make out the shape of her father's head, just barely. She thought his hands might be chained up above it. She crouched down, reached out, tried to find his face with her hands.

"My Tessie," he said, and his voice, always composed, was shaking. "I never could have guessed there would come a time I wasn't glad to see you."

Tessa half laughed, half sobbed.

"Hi, papa," she said, hiccuping a little. His beard was scratchy under her fingers. "I missed you."

"Johnny, I need you to do something for me."

Johnny Dogs must have known Tommy's expressions well enough to not ask questions. Charlie Strong's yard was drenched in rain, flowing in rivlets into the canal. The fires of the factories still burned, off in the distance, but the smoke was smothered by the downpour.

"What is it ya need me ta do, Tommy?"

"I need you to blow up a car," he said, slinging on his holster, stowing his pistol, checking the chamber of another, standing by a rain splattered vehicle. The brim of his hat was no longer doing any good keeping the water out of his eyes, so he grabbed it off his head, threw it onto the ground without sparing it a second glance.

"Which car, Tom?"

"That one," he said, gesturing without looking. He slid the other pistol behind the back of his belt.

Johnny's eyes were wide. "When?"

"Right now," Tommy told him, sliding into the front seat of a car the color of fire. "There's a kit in the back. And a machine gun."

Johnny did not ask what the machine gun was for, looking like he would rather not know. "Who else is with us, Tommy?"

"Just me and you, Dogs," Tommy said, and he turned the ignition.

Tessa was yanking on the chains, the noise clattering, echoing off the walls of the small room.

"It's no use, my dear. They're bolted to the wall. You need to get out of here," her father pleaded, and she could see the outline of his face now, the line of his nose. "Go, while you still can!"

"I'm not leaving you," she said, trying to pry the lock with the blade of her tiny knife.

"Damn your mother for giving you her stubbornness," Leonard said, leaning his head back against the wall in a familiar display of exasperation over his daughter. "This is not a game, Tessa, there are men upstairs who will kill you. I'm surprised they haven't arrived already."

Tessa thought about Ada stomping in a man's skull with her high heel. "I'm not playing games today. I'm going to get you out."

"Tessie! We can't get out. They have men at every entrance. We'll be shot on sight."

"Then we had better not be seen," she said, and the scalpel slipped and cut her wrist. "Fuck," she said, forgetting to monitor her language in her father's presence, although, given the circumstances, she felt it was more than warrented.

"Someone's coming," her father whispered, and she hadn't heard the footsteps over her curse. A light appeared across the room, past the open door. Tessa stood, moved as quickly and as quietly as she could to the other side of the darkened cell, scalpel in her hands and back pressed against the damp wall.

Angry, raised German voices grew nearer.

"I'll check the prisoner. Go look upstairs."

"Arnholt said to wait outside, to not enter within the hour, no exceptions-," Tessa heard Beck's quavering voice respond.

"Did you hear what I was hearing? Something is fucking wrong. Go check the prisoner or I'll put a bullet in your head," said the other voice, and she realized with a sudden rush of terror that she recognized it too. Romanoff. From Ignatius Hospital. He was coming closer.

"What are you doing, old man? Don't you know we have your daughter? Not a good time to get brave," he was saying, his footsteps thudding. Leonard glanced at Tessa, his lips moving soundlessly. She shook her head, imploring him. _Don't look at me. Don't let him know I'm here. _Romanoff was carrying a gas lamp, its swinging light illuminating the basement past the broken door to the cell.

"What the fuck did you do to this door?" Romanoff asked, before she could even see his face, his blonde hair appearing only a few feet in front of her, but he was faced away, looking at her father. He hadn't seen her.

"Who else is here, you English fuck? Where are they?" He crouched down and grabbed Leonard by the lapels, nearly lifting him off the floor, the lamp forgotten behind him, just out of the doorway, just far enough away that Tessa was still in shadow.

Leonard didn't respond, his mouth firmly closed, his eyes fixed on a spot past Romanoff's shoulder. Romanoff slapped him.

"I asked you a question," he said, roughly, and when her father did not respond, he reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. "You know, your little girl took my gun off me. Stole it from under my nose. I'll kill her for that, after I've had my fun with her. The only reason I haven't killed _you_ yet is because of Arnholt's orders. But I don't see him here, do you?" He sneered into her father's face, his teeth bared like a dog. "So if I would you, I would fucking answer. You have five seconds, or I blow your brains against this wall, orders or no."

Her father closed his eyes. Romanoff started to count.

"Five."

"Four."

"Three."

"Two."

Tessa moved behind him, completely silent, somehow, completely steady, somehow, like she wasn't in control of her own body, and in one motion, slid her scalpel across his throat.

Romanoff gasped, spluttered, sprayed blood across her father's face, slapped a hand to the gushing wound on his neck. He was raising his gun. Tessa watched him do it, immobile, frozen. In the basement of an old farmhouse, somewhere outside of nowhere, a shot rang out.


	28. Chapter 28

Thomas Shelby stood in the doorway, only a silhouette, his gun still raised, and the body of a huge, blonde German man crumpled on top of Leonard Reilly, bleeding from his neck and from a shot to the head. Tessa turned, stunned, so shocked she couldn't think of what to say, of what to do, of anything. All that came out of her mouth, the only thought in her blank white mind, like a sheet of paper before the artist dips into the watercolor, was to stare at Tommy, and say,

"You came."

"Yeah," was all he replied with, wiping a spray of blood from his face.

"Tommy," Tessa said, frantically, "they had Ada, they fucking had Ada, here, and she tried to get out but I don't know if she did-,"

"I know, I already found her, running down the street in her fucking underwear. It's alright, she's with Johnny Dogs now," _And a military grade tommy gun and enough dynamite to blow up your father's house and all his stables, _he thought, but didn't say, because he didn't want to think about it, couldn't think about it, about finding her, safe, only to leave her again and have her not still be safe when he returned. "And now we need to go. Cover your ears." He walked up to her father, pointed his gun again, shot it right at the spot where the chains were adhered to the stone wall. The _BANG _was deafening, coupled with the echo and the crumbling of stone. He worried about going deaf again. It was a miracle it hadn't happened yet, the only miracle he was likely to see in this life. The manacles fell with a clatter, still attached to her father's wrists, but free of the wall. "Thomas Shelby," he said, offering Leonard Reilly his pistol-free hand and wrenching him to his unsteady feet. Her father was covered in blood and brains, his glasses missing, his hair in disarray. "You probably remember me."

Her father did not spare Tommy a second glance. He was staring at his daughter, who was staring at the body on the floor. Her hands were dripping red. Tommy did not have time to decipher his expression, but if he had to guess, he would probably have gone with horror. His little girl, holding a knife, staring at the man whose throat she had just slit. Tessa's face was completely empty. Tommy understood.

"I…," she said, then stopped, like she couldn't get any farther, couldn't form any more thoughts or words. "He…," she tried to continue, then shook her head, just barely. Her mouth moved again, but no sounds came out. Tommy took a step closer to her, tentatively, then realized with a belated kind of shock that her chest was heaving, her breathing hyperventilating, the blood on her fingers splattering the ground because of the force with which her hands were shaking.

"Hey," Tommy said, sharply, more sharply than he had intended to, because of the fear, more afraid for her than he was of the armed German military upstairs. "Hey," he said again, softer, trying to reach her, took another slow step nearer to her. She looked up at him, away from the body, finally, and if he had a heart, the look in her eyes would have shattered it. A tear slipped out, glittering like a diamond in the low light, just one, and she looked down at her hands like she didn't know who they belonged to.

"Listen to me," Tommy said. "You didn't kill him. Okay? I did." He cocked his pistol again, shot the body in the chest without really looking, for good measure. Reilly jumped. Tessa didn't move, didn't flinch. "You didn't kill him. It's okay. It's alright." She nodded a tiny bit, but went back to looking at the body, like she wasn't even aware Tommy or her father were in the room. Tommy took her hand with his free one, to snap her out of her stupor, and she yelped.

"Sorry," she said, and he wanted to laugh, "my thumb is broken."

"They broke your fucking thumb?" The first one wasn't enough, the blonde brute at his feet. Tommy wanted to kill all of them for so much as touching her.

"No," she said, sounding far away, like she found the whole situation mildly curious. "I did." She was still staring at the corpse, the remnants of bone, the place where the back of a skull had been. Her hair looked like individual strands of gold in the crooked light of the gas lamp on the floor, her eyes shadowed like a skeleton. Tommy didn't know what to say, or think, and he didn't have time to figure it out, so he kept his face neutral and tried to reach her.

"Tess," he said, but he realized within an instant that her eyes were rolling back and her body going slack, and he got to her just before she crumpled on the ground. Her father watched him catch her, like he had watched everything since the first gunshot, and Thomas wanted to scream at him, would have, if he thought it could have done any good. _Your daughter broke her own thumb and killed a man within a span of two hours, and you're just going to fucking stand there? _He wanted to ask, but he scooped Tessa up, tried to be rational, because if she was conscious and not completely fucking terrified, that's what she would have wanted him to do. She was dead weight in his arms, and he hoped she would wake up soon, because they needed to move, and fast.

"Come on," he said, to her father, the man who had caused all of this shit. Tommy knew that, logically, it was hardly Reilly's fault, but for the moment, he needed someone to blame that wasn't himself. He would deal with his own regret later. He nodded at Reilly, who was still crouched on the floor in the corner of the dark cell, then at the body of the blonde German, staring at Tommy.

"You called her Tess," he said, and Tommy heard a plethora of nuances in his voice, none of which Tommy had the fucking time to deal with at the moment. The old man might be in some state of shock, but his priorities were questionable, despite the situation or because of it. "That's what her mother called her," the other man continued, his voice soft.

Tommy wanted to say "Are you fucking serious right now?" aloud, but he didn't, letting his expression relay it for him.

"Take his gun." He told him instead, and Reilly looked like he would rather have flung himself off a building, but he took the gun from the German's slack hand, his own trembling. Tommy turned and started up the stairs, before coming to the fairly obvious realization that he couldn't carry Tessa and hold a gun at the same time. He glanced back at Reilly, who had made no move to follow, which made Tommy want to hit him.

"Can you shoot?" Tommy asked him.  
"No," the old man whispered, his face ashen.

"Fucking hell," Tommy said, and moved Tessa as gently as he could to hand her to her father, holding her head up when it lolled to the side as he held her out to him. "Take her. Give me the gun. She'll wake soon, she's just overwhelmed. The body shuts itself down sometimes. Happened all the fucking time in France." Tommy realized once he said this that Reilly, as the CMO, was undoubtedly already aware of the phenomenon. He traded Tessa's slack form for the German's Ceska Zbrojovka vz. 22, a semi-auto, which he kept in his left hand because it would have less recoil than his revolver, which was now down three bullets.

"And you're so sure about that? What if she's injured?" Tommy gave Reilly a few points back for his concern over Tessa's welfare, but then immediately retracted them because of the ungratefulness of his tone. Tommy had just saved both of their lives, after all.

"Oh, she's definitely injured," he said, approaching the staircase again, checking the pistol's mag, releasing the slide. _Fully loaded. Good. _

Reilly spluttered. "To say that with such nonchalance! She is my only daughter-,"

No one had ever claimed that Tommy was a patient man.

"Oi! You won't have even an only daughter if you don't shut up. Now let's _fucking go_," he said, and this time, he decided if the old man didn't follow him, he would take Tessa himself, guns be damned, do his best to get them both out, and leave the old fucker here. Serve the wrinkly bastard right.

"You should allow me to take a moment to inspect her for physical symptoms-," Reilly continued, but Tommy turned and started walking away.

"We don't have fucking time for you to do a fucking physical on her. Its the mental symptoms that will be worse, anyway," he snapped, the old wood of the stairs creaking under his weight as he climbed, and he heard with a mingling relief and continued annoyance that Reilly had finally decided that getting out of the hellhole fit into his busy schedule. Tommy kept both guns aloft. The distraction, provided by Johnny Dogs, had undoubtedly served to remove some of the German guards, but it had also undoubtedly not removed all of them. Tommy appreciated that it was a large house. It allowed for more stealth, but the flip side of the coin of luck was that the soldiers stationed there were all acclimated to the house's blueprint, and Tommy was not. And he had an unconscious woman and an old man in tow. So the odds were not in his favor, but when were they? He thought about France, waiting with his brothers to die in the snow.

He gestured for Reilly to wait once he reached the top of the stairs, peeking around the corner, revolver at the ready, pistol held tense by his side. Tessa stirred in her father's arms, her eyes blinking open, beautiful even with her split lip, even looking like she had crawled through the gates of hell. Tommy's heart was pounding, thumping against his ribcage like a rabbit whose leg was caught in a trap.

"What the fuck?" Tessa mumbled quietly, looking completely lost, like she couldn't remember where she was or how she had gotten there. She probably couldn't. Tommy wondered if, at some point during the night, she could have gotten a concussion. He did not like how likely it was.

"Good morning, sweetheart," he said, and even to his ears, it sounded too flat, feigning too hard for nonchalance, but Tessa met his eyes, and hers had the ghost of a smile in them, even as her father frowned. She slipped down from Reilly's arms, trying to gather her bearings, shaking her head a bit to clear it. He couldn't give her the time to get herself together, even if he may have wished to.

"Wait for my signal," he told them, and then he moved out from behind the staircase wall, his guns held in front of him like they were swords and he was Achilles, going into battle.


	29. Chapter 29

The staircases let them out on the first of the three stories, not including the basement they had emerged from. Tommy assumed there was some sort of back door, probably through the kitchen, so that's the direction he headed, based on instinct and pure blind chance. If he was the German officer in command, he would have left three or four men to guard the house. Enough to keep things secure, not so many as to weaken them in case whatever or whoever had caused the explosion stuck around to put up a fight. Johnny could take several of them out with the tommy gun, maybe even most of them. They had found him a good position, high on a hill behind an old, crumbling stone wall for protection, right above where Tommy instructed him to set the car ablaze. A very good position. Tommy kept his fingers on the triggers. The house was dusty, and the floors creaked softly with their every step. They were hardly inconspicuous, and if any men were left in the house, they would almost undoubtedly hear them, and the fact that they had yet to be ambushed made Tommy think that the remaining Germans were likely stationed outside. A sudden noise to his left, which opened to the parlor, made Tommy spin, and he almost squeezed the trigger but then the noise said, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Orion! Orion!", and Tommy didn't lower his gun but he didn't pop four bullets off like he wanted to, either. _Orion _was the code word Solomons had given him, of fucking course, although why he had bothered with a fucking code word if all he was going to do was go back on his word was beyond Tommy's comprehension. The man who had spoken emerged from his crouched position behind a threadbare, moth-eaten sofa in the parlor, opening his mouth to speak again, hands on his head, but before he could Tommy said, "Be _fucking _quiet," pointing at the man with one of the guns to make sure his point was made. The man gulped and nodded, keeping his hands in the air.

"M-my name is Beck, I work for-for Solomons-," he said, in a whisper, and Tommy scoffed.

"Yeah, I know. If you make it out alive, you go tell Solomons if I ever see him again, I'll send him to that God he claims to love."

The man looked horrified. "But-,"

"Get out, or I'll shoot you myself. Maybe you'll draw some of them away from us," Tommy said, his voice hard.

"Tommy," Tessa said, from behind him. She put a hand on his arm, gently. Her pale knuckles were splattered with blood. "If he works for Solomons, he knows how to shoot." She looked at him, her almond eyes bright, imploring. A smart girl. She was right. It didn't make him any happier to admit it. They needed more coverage, more guns in more hands. He gave a quick, irritated sigh, flipped the revolver in his right hand, and held it out to Solomon's man, whose dark eyes were filled with relief like he had just gotten to piss after having to hold it for three hours. Tommy pulled his other pistol out of the back of his suspenders, and Reilly watched him do it.

"Thank you," Beck said, looking at Tessa. She stared back. Her face was set, her delicate features sharp like the thorns on a rose.

"He gave you the gun with three less bullets in it," she said. "And if I ask him to, he'll use the rest to thank you for fucking off and leaving us alone with Arnholt earlier."

Tommy didn't want to learn what she meant by "alone with Arnholt". He didn't want to know. He looked over at Reilly, who looked nauseous at her words, and a quiet part of himself that Tommy rarely listened to agreed with his expression, although probably for different reasons. He then looked around at his sad little flock, Tessa with only a bloody scalpel to defend herself, her father with less, a Jew who had about as much spine as a jellyfish. He was surprised they weren't all dead already.

He turned and began making his way through the house again, only really aware of Tessa, wishing he had a hundred more men and a thousand more bullets.

Tommy moved like a soldier, his usual swagger replaced with careful, calculated motions, silent and swift and controlled. How many versions of him were there, she wondered, how many facets? A boy who loved horses, a sergeant major directing a battle, a gangster cutting out eyes, a businessman carrying a briefcase. It was a wonder he didn't explode, with all the universes contained inside of him. She had a sudden, stupid desire to reach out and take his hand, to feel a little bit safer, the tiniest bit more okay, but he had guns in both. She wondered if she had ever really been okay, besides when she was with him, and she wondered if she ever would be again, if they somehow, magically survived. She looked to her side to reassure herself that her father was keeping pace. He was, still wearing the same charcoal colored vest she had last seen him in, although now the color was nearly indistinguishable past the blood and the dirt and all manner of other horrible things. She took his hand instead of Tommy's, shifting her scalpel to her injured left, tried to smile at him. His face wavered, and then he managed a grimace back.

They tiptoed past the parlor, down a hallway that was much too narrow for Tessa's liking. There were faded spots on the wall where pictures had once hung. The hall opened up to the kitchen, and across the kitchen, there was a door. Tessa wanted to weep. Maybe, just maybe, they would get out. Maybe she would get to ride Chase again, and kiss Tommy again, maybe the Shelbys would protect her father, maybe she would be able to put this whole, twisted nightmare behind her. She let herself hope, in that instant, and she should have known better. The door they were approaching, their very last chance, their saving grace, banged open, and German men poured into the room.


	30. Chapter 30

There were four or five of them, Tommy didn't have time to count, didn't have time to check their locations, their formation, potential weaknesses or exposed areas, defensible positions, their weapons, nothing. He only had a split second, enough time to shout, "Get DOWN," to his other, horrendously outmatched, troops; the girl, the old man, the Jew. Only enough time to react, to respond to impulses that should have been driven by the innate, intuitive reflex of self preservation above all. But in that moment, he did not listen to the deepest, most archaic instinct of survival. Instead, during those tiny, comparatively insignificant microseconds, he made a choice, one that upon later reflection he realized he would have made over and over again, a hundred thousand times, a choice that was never really even a choice at all and therefore required no hesitation or deliberation on his part. _Her or me?_ He threw himself on top of Tessa, knocking her behind the kitchen counter with the force of his tackle, shielding her head with his arms. Bullets popped off of surfaces like a child's dropped marbles, sending debris flying through the air, bits of cabinet and wallpaper, a pantomime of celebratory confetti.

"Stay down!" He yelled to Tessa, over the noise over the gunshots, returning fire from behind the kitchen counter to ensure the Germans did not try to advance. _One. _He could see the black legs of their pants from his crouched position on the floor, quickly retreating behind walls and doorways and overturned furniture to shield themselves from his responding bullets. He shot again, and one went down, but he hadn't had a clean target and doubted the hit would kill. _Two. _He shouldn't have given his other pistol to Beck. Four bullets left. He would run out before the Germans even got to them. He shot again, but had to duck back before he could even see if his shot had landed so that he didn't have his brains splattered against the dingy farmhouse wall. _Three. _He braced himself, back pressed against the counter, letting the Germans waste their ammunition. He thought of France again, his brother's breath floating in the cold air as they sang their swan song. He glanced at Tessa, for the briefest moment, and she had her hands covering her head, to protect her ears from the explosive noise or as a last, feeble defense, he did not know. He peeked around the corner again, as quickly as he could, pistol aimed. There was a body on the floor only a few feet away from them. A body could mean a gun. He needed another gun.

"Tessa," he said, taking her arms in his hands, still holding guns in both, pulling them down and forcing her to meet his eyes. "Take this," he handed her the German's semi, and she looked so scared, "and cover me."

"I- dont know how-," she said, her words trembling, barely decipherable over the continued gunfire.

"Hold it like this," Tommy said, taking her hands, forgetting about her thumb, "point, shoot."

"Tommy-," he cut her off with a kiss, brief and hard, and he got some the blood on her lip in his mouth.

"I meant what I said," he told her, and he needed to go, he needed to fend the Germans off, he needed to protect her, but he also needed her to know. "By the lake. I meant it." He looked in her eyes for just one moment longer, just one second, trying to memorize them, the indecisive blue-green-grey like the waves of a stormy sea, a ring of yellow around her black pupils like a sunflower. She pressed her lips together like she was trying to lock his kiss inside of them, and nodded, and held the gun up to her chest.

"That's my girl," he said, and then he moved out from behind the counter, the bullets falling like the rain outside.

If Tessa had been asked to explain the following seconds, the sequence of events, she doubted she would be able to. The moments became less memories than vague impressions, sounds, feelings, with a warped kind of film over them like they had been packed away by her mind in the attic of her thoughts, in a box somewhere they couldn't hurt her. The first shot she fired blasted off into the ceiling across the room, yanking her unprepared arm upwards with the force of the recoil. She had never so much as held a gun before. Her uncle had gone hunting, and occasionally taken her brother along with him, but she had been strictly forbidden from accompanying them or being allowed near the firearms. Her father was firmly against guns, and never kept them in the house. They were a man's tools, her uncle had said. She fired again, almost completely guessing, shocked at how easy it was to pull the trigger, how immediate and intense the reaction. The Germans were hunched behind various defensive positions- behind the open back door, an overturned table which bore the mark of Tessa's most recent shot, hiding in the hallway that led to the parlor. There were at least two bodies on the floor, and Tessa almost, almost let herself think the horrible, heart-wrenching, world-stopping thought, what if, but she stopped herself, pulled the trigger over the counter in the vague direction of the man lurking in the hallway, ducked down again. She had lost track of Tommy the moment he dove out from behind the counter, and she had to know, she had to see him, had to make sure he was okay, there were still shots being fired but her ears were ringing so badly she could no longer make out what direction they were coming from. The Germans were wearing all black, and their shiny boots flashed at her when she took as quick a glance out from behind the counter as she could, like deadly animals hiding in wait, ready to strike. She heard another shot and heard a body fall, and she knew she shouldn't, knew she was more likely to get shot than to get answers she wasn't even sure she wanted, but she looked out, and Tommy had made it across the room, somehow, taken the German's place behind the swinging back door and was using it as a shield, firing back with two guns, and she couldn't even keep track of where he had gotten them from. Where is my father she wanted to cry, wanted to scream, probably could have without having her voice be heard over the bang bang bang of the pistols, but she took a deep breath, leaned out, aimed, shot. This time her arm didn't jerk, she held her hand steadier. From behind the corner to the parlor hallway, the man went down. She thought she might have hit him in the arm. A man stood to a crouch from behind the heavy oak table, leveled his gun at Tommy's hidden form behind the bullet-ridden door, and Tessa froze and watched, with a detached, abject horror she had never before felt, but a bullet sheared directly next to her cheek, so close she thought she felt it brush through her hair, and she ducked reflexivley, and by the time she looked up over the counter again, the German man was on the ground, shot in the side of the head, bleeding onto the ground, and Tommy was still standing, checking his remaining rounds, recocking the slide. She was breathing so quickly through her nose she thought she might make herself pass out. Where is my father? There was only one German left firing, somehow. She wasn't sure when that had happened. She wasn't sure how Tommy could have managed it, there had been at least four, and she remembered, a bit belatedly, that he was a war veteran, that he had won medals. This was what he was good at. She wasn't sure how she felt about that, but doubted she would live through the night so decided she might as well not worry about it for the time being. Her hands pressed against the dusty floor, pistol trapped under one, back against the cabinets, and suddenly it was silent in the destroyed kitchen, deafening, louder even than the ringing in her ears. She wondered if this was how it felt for Tommy all the time, a silence that, after the cacophony of bullets, pierced louder than the steel against skin, because only in contrast to the quiet could the noise be truly felt. She stood, ever so slowly, glanced around the corner of her life saving counter, to the grisly scene in the rest of the dining room. There were no more shots cracking out from the other side of the room. The last man remained hidden behind the dark wooden table, it's once-handsome legs snapped, covered in little round holes. She looked at Tommy, who was back down to a single gun, held firmly up by both hands, at the ready. He looked back at her, jerked his head at the German, mouthed, "Shoot". She winced a bit, raised her gun, and shot.


	31. Chapter 31

The German returned fire. Tommy made a bet, and hoped that he was right, and that Tessa wouldn't be shot because of it. Hoped, because that was all he could do, because whatever he felt for her, he did what he had to do. He always did what he had to do, and this was it. The last man was distracted, trying to get a better view of Tessa's copper colored head, allowing Tommy to move out from behind the door, cover the few strides across the room, and raise his gun. He leveled it, shot, got so close he could see the German's black hair move over his forehead as the man flinched out of the bullet's way. The man raised, fired, and it tore through Tommy's arm, but he kept moving forward, closing the space between them before the other man could fit in another squeeze of the trigger, but the German kicked out, his foot colliding with Tommy's knee, making it buckle. Tommy went halfway down, to his knees, caught himself with the hand of the arm he had just been shot in, the hand that was holding his gun, which skittered across the floor, and the unexpected jolts of pain doubled as the man's fist collided with his jaw. The German was wearing a heavy, gilded ring on his right hand, and Tommy's vision blurred and swam with popping lights and pain from the blow. The other man raised his fist again for an uppercut, but Tommy raised his forearm to block it, then angled his elbow upward, catching his opponent in the temple, and struggled back to his feet. He aimed a kick at the other man's torso, knocking his wind out, then another, to the face. There could be no mercy. Mercy didn't exist. Mercy was just weakness with a placating smile, and it was Tommy or it was him, the nameless other, the man at his feet. That was the only choice. _Him or me. Not mercy or no mercy. That is the only question. The answer is the same. Him or me. _The man swiped at Tommy's feet with his legs, trying to knock him off balance, shuffling out from behind the overturned table like a backwards crab, his hand groping blindly behind him for a gun, for a weapon, but Tommy sidestepped his attempts to trip him, which gave the other man time to scramble to his knees, lunge at Tommy again. He dug his fingers into Tommy's bleeding arm, and Tommy thought he might have screamed, but everything was nothing, just a struggle, just limbs and pain and weaknesses and bullet holes and blood. The other man seized the upper hand somehow, and then Tommy did, somehow, got his hands around the man's neck and started to squeeze. He turned blue, then purple, then an ugly, mottled red, his legs twitching desperately, hands flailing at his sides. Tommy kept squeezing, closed his eyes, but the nightmare was in his hands, not his head, and when he opened them again the man was lying still. He took a second, just one, to breathe because he still could, let his head hang, felt the burning fucking pain in his arm and appriciated it, somehow, for proving that he could still be hurt, that he too had suffered in exchange for all the suffering he caused. He stood, and walked to where Tessa was still behind the counter, peeking out past it, wobbling slightly on his feet, not even able to isolate the specific reason why. He didn't look down at the body, at any of the bodies. Her eyes followed him, watched him grow nearer. There was something in them, but he didn't want to know what it was, because it looked like it might have been fear. She looked younger to him in that moment than she ever had before, despite the blood on her face and gun in her white-knuckled hands. There were bruises circling her pale neck, like an upside down crown of thorns, across the smooth line of her jaw, dark against the ivory of her skin, blood splattered across it like bright red freckles against the bright red of her hair. He lowered himself to her level, and wished he hadn't, because he wasn't sure he would be able to convince himself to rise again.

"You alright?" He asked, and she nodded, but she wasn't. He offered her his hand, and she still took it, but she let go once she had stood to her full, sleight height. She wasn't looking at him anymore, her eyes roaming the room with a kind of expression like she was forcing herself to do it against her own desires.

Beck's body was crumpled against the wall, still bleeding profusely from several holes in his abdomen, holding the gun Tommy gave him. Tessa wondered if he had even gotten one good shot off on it, or if they shouldn't have even wasted it on him, and the cruelty of the thought surprised her. The lack of sympathy she felt looking down at him surprised her as well, his wide eyes closed, bulbous nose leaking a small stream of red. She thought of how he followed orders and left the house when Arnholt had taken Ada, and then she no longer felt remorse for her lack of remorse. She moved past him, commanding her joints to work, her muscles to contract, to propel her body forward when it felt like there were invisible hands of trepidation holding her back.

"Papa?" She called, her voice cracking a little with fear. There was no response. "Dad?" She called to him again, and from down the narrow hallway, Tommy said,

"Tessa. He's here," and his tone gave away nothing, but his words did, and she stumbled desperately to him, her mind blank but her knees trembling so badly she could hardly walk.

"He's breathing," Tommy said, evenly, calmly, while checking his pulse, and Tessa fell to the ground next to her father, who was lying on his stomach, bleeding from his lower back like he had been shot trying to get to safety. She felt horribly, horribly sick, she felt like she should have done more to prevent this, even if there was no possible way for her to have, and she was disgusted with herself for not trying harder, for not doing better. There were salty tears streaming down her cheeks, and she took her father's hand, which felt cold. Her throat was tight and burning and constricted and sore, but her voice was flat when she asked,

"Will he be alright?"

Tommy looked up at her. He was crouched by her father as well, his hands covered in blood, maybe her father's, maybe his own, maybe someone else's. Tessa couldn't remember, couldn't keep track. She wondered if he could. His eyes gripped her, opium, and said _I will let you go when I want to. _She stroked her father's hand and wondered, for a moment, if she had gotten shot, if he wouldn't have. If there was a way for her to make that trade with the universe, she would have done it. Tommy didn't answer her question, just said,

"We need to get him the fuck out of here." And grunted slightly as he slid the larger, older man onto and across his shoulders, standing slowly under his weight. Tessa was so grateful to him, so scared of him in that moment she couldn't form the words "thank you", so nauseatingly concerned about her father she couldn't say "please help him", so terrified and horrified and traumatized all she could do was stand and stare, thinking about Tommy's hands around the twitching German man's throat, Tommy's hands around hers as he kissed her, Arnholt's hands, Tommy's around a gun, hers around a gun, and she stood on her toes to place a small, chaste kiss on Tommy's bloody cheek. The slight scratch of stubble caught her bleeding lip, and it was a twisted kind of juxtaposition, her kiss covered in red. Tommy sighed, quietly, and readjusted her father slightly.

"Come," he said, turning and moving back down the hallway, her father's unconscious form draped over him like a huge overcoat. Tommy was still holding a gun.

"Your medals," Tessa said. He looked over his shoulder at her, turning slightly so that he could see her past her father. "You deserved them," she said, and he looked blank, but she could see that under that he looked angry, and under that he looked sad. He turned back around.

Reilly was fucking heavy. How such a large man had such a small daughter, fuck knew. She must have taken her height, or lack thereof, from her mother. Tommy responded to his own, falsely ambivalent, thoughts, with a detached sort of curiosity. Odd that his mind should try to force him into some semblance of normalcy, as if this wasn't what it begged for, in the small hours of the night, this blood and this pain and this darkness, the only thing it was familiar with, the only thing it remembered how to know. Odd that now it should be deflecting the truth that it always seemed to search for otherwise.

_What are you? _

He knew, and he wished he didn't.

There was blood on his hands and a man's body on his back. Did that even out? Would he have saved Reilly if it wasn't for his promise to his daughter? Did it matter what he would or wouldn't have done, weighed against the bodies he was leaving in a trail behind him? Why did he bother with these questions of morality, when he knew damn well that he had his own code, and fuck what anyone else said?

They passed back through the kitchen. Tommy saw Beck lying in a pool of his own blood, but it registered like a passing cloud in the sky of his thoughts. _Water is wet, Beck is dead. _He moved on.

Reilly stirred on his shoulder, and lifted his head slightly.

"Tessa," he said, his first thought, and she was there instantly, gripping his hand. Tommy lowered him gently, more for Tessa's sake and at the risk of her scolding than anything else. His hair was matted with dried blood. She supported her father, holding both of them.

Reilly tried to speak again, but all that came out was a wheeze. For a moment, Tommy pitied him. It would have been better if he had remained unconscious. Less painful. But he was alive, and Tommy supposed that counted for something, made this whole venture not a complete fucking waste of time and simeltaneous threat to the lives of almost everyone Tommy cared about.

"Shh," Tessa said, gently, hooking one of her father's arms over her shoulders. "Don't try to talk, it's alright. I'm alright. We're going to get out of here," and she kept talking in a low, soothing voice as they staggered back to the kitchen, and Tommy knew it was for her father's benefit, but he listened too, so hard it took him several more seconds than it ordinarily would have to notice choked breathing calling out to him through the darkness of the dining room, the sky having darkened beyond the gray of the rain into the deep blackness of a post-downpour night outside the large rear facing windows and open back door, and Tommy cocked the hammer of his pistol, one he had taken from one of the Germans, he could hardly remember which, immediately, goosebumps rising down his neck and arms. _Another? _His mind asked him, in a tired voice, and Tommy pushed it down, and a different voice, a quieter one, said, _another, _like it was hungry, and he pushed that one down farther. Tessa hung back and her father hung on her, his face like a skull, gaunt and scared.

"Please," a voice rasped, followed by more unsteady breaths, and Tommy located the source to where the man had apparently drug himself, leaving a streak of red behind to map his progress, a cannibalized Hansel and Gretle. He was halfway upright, on the wall, surrounded by his fallen comrades, bleeding from a shot under his collarbone.

"Please, leave me," he said, and he was right by the door, the back door that was open and unguarded and covered in bullet holes. "For the love of God, please, just go, for the love of-,"

"I have no love," Tommy said, and he raised with no hesitation and shot the man through the eye.


	32. Chapter 32

They walked through the door. Tessa wondered if maybe she had actually died, and this was the doorway to the afterlife, shot to hell, hanging half off its hinges, splattered with blood. Her father's weight leaned heavy on her, his feet dragging, hardly able to move, his breathing labored. Tommy forged ahead, not glancing back to check on his other companions, the sharp cut of his dark hair, exposing the shape of his skull, making him seem as though he blended into the shadows of the night, was being pulled away into the darkness. Tessa took her first, wobbling steps outside of the house, into the chilly air of the overgrown, sloping lands behind it, and she was careful with her father but part of her wanted to drop his arm from around her shoulder and sprint off into the fields and trees and nothingness in the night and never return. The stars were blinking past the clinging wisps of remaining cloud in the sky, the land still shivering and wet from the day's deluge. The moon was still only a hair away from full, shining down so brightly it gleamed off of Tommy's hair, his gun, the shining blood on his arm that she hadn't seen when they were inside.

"Thomas," she called out, and the unintentional formality fell badly on her ears, like they were back to the day they met, like he hadn't been inside her. She didn't want to think about that, what it did or didn't mean to him. She didn't really want to think about what it meant to her, either. He turned around briefly at the sound of his name, like he was more concerned with whether or not they were keeping up with him than whatever it was she had to say. "You're hurt," she said, like maybe he didn't fucking know.

He shrugged with one shoulder, the one that didn't have blood leaking all over his expensive shirt from his bicep. "Bullet went through," he said, as if that negated any concern. Tessa fell silent, and focused on leading her father, whose steps were becoming slower and whose weight around her shoulders was steadily increasing the farther they moved from the farmhouse. Tessa assumed that Thomas knew where he was going, and followed him blindly, her mind completely blank and unfocused, floating through the motions, disconnected from any physical awareness or truely any awareness at all. Her father went completely slack suddenly, pulling Tessa down to her knees on the frigid, slick ground with him, his eyes rolling back in his head. She tapped his face gently, saying, "Dad? Dad!" then harder, but he did not stir for several moments. Thomas paused up ahead, but made no move to return, twenty feet away from Tessa and her prone father. Leonard's eyes flickered open, but he looked like he was seeing past them, past Tessa, until they focused on Tommy's distant silhouette.

He said something under his breath that Tessa couldn't catch, and then, much louder and clearer than she was anticipating, he spoke. "You get away from him. Tessie," he said her name but was still looking at Tommy's dark shape with hazy eyes. Tessa wondered what it was he was seeing, wondered if Tommy could hear him. "I told her. Predator," Leonard said, barely a whisper, muttered something else, before his lids fluttered and his consciousness disappeared again. Tessa gazed down at his familiar, unfamiliar face, cradled in her lap, at a complete loss. His features were covered in dark blood, his face needed a week's worth of shaves. The scruff looked out of place to Tessa on his usually impeccably clean cheeks, making him seem like another person, a stranger she didn't know. She wondered what she had looked like to him, thought she might be better off not knowing. Tommy's soft footsteps approached her, the long grass swishing against his legs. She looked up at him, and for a moment the moon glowed behind his head like a broken halo, and she felt a sudden painful pressure in her chest like the wind had just been knocked out of her, like her ribcage had become concave. She wondered if he could hear the shuddering breath she drew, if he could hear her thoughts, if he could reach into her chest and twist her heart in his hands without her even knowing, if that's why it felt like it was being constricted right then. He held her eyes, their gaze locked, and even through the night it felt like staring into the sun, like he was burning too bright, searing his impression onto her retinas, and still she couldn't look away. They were speaking without words, and he was always, always, unapologetically unpacified, _this is who I am, and if you can't handle it, leave, _and she wanted to tell him that being with him felt like being chained to the tail of a comet, like telling God to leave you a message, and you would get back to him when you could. But she said,

"Help him. Please," and Thomas looked at her for a moment longer, one hand in his pocket, eyes hard, considering. Then he tucked his gun into his belt, crouched down, and lifted her father up across his shoulders, despite the bullet hole in his right arm. Tessa stood as well, walking by Tommy's side through the field, wondering vaguely where they were headed, whether they were about to get shot by hidden German rifles.

Tessa moved silently beside him, but Tommy's breaths were coming in sharply through his bruised abdomen. He thought he probably had a few cracked ribs, maybe even broken. His nose and mouth were both bleeding from the battering they had taken from the German's ring, but mostly his arm was screaming in pain, and he wondered if it would hurt even more in the bullet was still in, thought he should probably be grateful but couldn't manage it. He could've been shot in the chest, in the head, in the back like Reilly. He was mildly shocked he hadn't been, and that Tessa hadn't, but the look on her face suggested otherwise, like she had been ridden with so many bullets she was trying to hold the blood inside her body with her hands, which she was pressing to the front of her gray dress as she walked, eyes glazed. He couldn't have reached out to her if he wanted to, struggling to keep her father's weight balanced on his sore shoulders, and he didn't want to. He didn't want to taint her with the blood on his hands ever again.

They made it over the crest of a hill, and the farmhouse faded behind it. On the slope of another incline, illuminating the wet dirt and the wild grass under their feet, a fire was burning. On an opposite hill, a crumbling stone wall lined the edge of the farmhouse property, and behind it, Tommy knew, was Johnny Dogs, and Ada, and a tommy gun with 250 rounds of ammunition. Tommy pointed at the spot as best he could while still keeping his grip on Reilly.

"My man is out there, with Ada. He's got a gun, but we have no way home."

Tessa looked at him sharply. "How the fuck did you get here, then?" She asked.

"I took your car. It was the fastest."

There was a spark of realization in her eyes, but she asked anyway. "And where is it now?"

Tommy jerked his head at the hill with a bright dot of fire at it's crest. Tessa was silent.

"You exploded my car," she said, and then, when he nodded, "Fuck." Her beautiful lips turned downwards in a sad little frown, briefly, and he allowed himself a second to contemplate the degree to which she cared about a fucking car when she had spent the past several hours being tied up and shot at and nearly killed more times than he could count. "I liked that car," she said, to herself, and then she sighed.

"We need to get to Johnny. The other Germans could be here, he could have gotten them all, he could have gotten none of them. Fuck knows," Tommy said, wishing for two free hands and a cigarette.

"So do we run?" Tessa asked, cradling her broken hand. Tommy scoffed.

"As much as I appreciate that you think I could run with Reilly Senior, here, we're going to have to settle for walking. Quickly." Tommy wasn't sure how much longer this night could last. He wasn't sure how much longer he could last through it. "Take the gun. There's two rounds. Don't shoot unless you have a clean target, or you absolutely have to." She moved nearer to him with a face full of trepidation, and he wondered at it for a moment. She had never been hesitant around him before, and it was odd to see from her, but he had no time to feel guilt for her fear, would keep moving forever if he had to, to ensure that he never did. Her hand slipped into the waistband of his pants to pull the pistol out, and the brief flash of warmth was enough to make his gut lurch like it had been tugged by a string. She was close to him now, close enough that her breath was tickling across his jaw, and it was fucking ridiculous, because he was literally holding her bleeding father on his back, but he wanted to kiss her, to drown himself in her waves and just let himself go under, and he didn't care about the expression in her eyes, or he told himself he didn't, and he could convince anyone of anything, even and especially himself. Then she blinked, soft lashes brushing her cheek for a split second, and took a step back, the gun in her slim hands, and Tommy felt like he had to peel his feet off where they were rooted to the earth to follow her when she turned around and began walking away.


	33. Chapter 33

Tessa held the gun so tightly that the edges of the steel cut into her hands, careful to keep her finger off the trigger, her feet aching in her heels, her throat aching from the breaths she was taking, her heart aching for more reasons than she wanted to list. She began descending into the valley between two small hills, one sloping and gradual, but taller, her car still burning at the very top, the other, where Johnny and Ada were meant to be positioned, was shadowed by poplar trees and marked the edge of the farmhouse's property with a low stone wall. She circled around, approaching from the flank instead of head-on, but the night was quiet, not even a breeze blowing through the leaves to rustle the branches. She realized she could see the dirt road leading up to the property once she had ascended the slight upward slope, and then she could see a gun.

Tommy heard the telltale series of noises that was a machine gun being loaded and repositioned, and that was _not _how he was going to go out, by friendly fire once he had finally reached some semblance of safety.

"Johnny! Don't fucking shoot! It's me!" He shouted, dropping to the ground on instinct, Reilly's large frame smothering him, waiting to be torn apart by a trigger happy Gypsy's bullets, waiting for the rest that would come after. Tessa ducked as well, but didn't have a soldier's instincts or reflexes.

"Tom?" A voice called out. Tommy sighed, relieved, disappointed, exhausted. He stood again, which was getting harder and harder for him to do, his backpack made out of comatose CMO and probable bloodloss due to the bulletwound taking their toll.

"It's me," he said, and Tessa stood from her defensive position, looking wary. They climbed the remaining portion of the hill, and at the top, stationed by his machine gun like God on his throne, was Johnny, and by his side was Ada, who ran to Tessa and gripped her tight the moment she saw her, a rather rare display of affection for Tommy's usually reserved sister. Tommy let Ada hug him as well, in turn, wincing from the pressure she inadvertently put on his arm.

"Where are the other Germans?" He asked Dogs, having had enough of the emotional reunions, especially considering they could all be for nothing. _We're not free yet. We're not done yet. _The words beat like a mantra in his mind.

Johnny was chewing on a long blade of grass. "Well, some of them are on this here hill," he said, gesturing to the slope beyond the mossy stones that formed the wall. "Wasn't too good uphill against me and my friend here, turns out." He knocked on the side of the gun, which resonated with a dull, metallic thud. Tessa and Ada were speaking softly in the background. The sky, off in some distant horizon, was just barely beginning to lighten. Johnny continued, his tone neutral like they were discussing the outcome of the latest betting crops. "Rest of 'em I 'spose got left at the house or ran off when they saw all the carnage." He took the grass out of his mouth, contemplatively. "I hope to God you've got a way to get us out of here other than that car you made me blow up." His accent lilted across the words like the cheerful notes of a fiddle.

Tommy shook his head, once. "Only one. You have any cigarettes?"

Tessa sat by her father's side with Ada, silent, watching the sun creep slowly up. She was trying to stifle some of the bleeding, but his eyes were twitching under their lids, his face pale and clammy, and she dared not remove the bullet lest she cause more damage, so she kept pressure on his back and watched him bleed out onto the fragrant green grass. Ada didn't speak, didn't look like she wanted to. Tommy and Johnny Dogs shared a few, clipped words, but Tommy came back over to where the two women and unconscious old man were soon after, a borrowed cigarette between his lips.

"Ada, may I have a moment with Tessa?" He asked, lighting up. His eyes were cold in the creeping, bare morning light when he raised them again, and Ada nodded and stood, still silent, and Tessa worried for her as she watched her walk back to Johnny and the gun. Tessa looked out at the sky over the hill instead of her father, instead of Tommy, and wondered if there was any way she could be able to convince herself that she had just woken up early in her bedroom and decided to go outside and enjoy the sunrise. A fantasy, but an appealing one. She had been having a lot of those, recently, it would seem. Tommy stood beside her, smoking, and then, to her surprise, he sat down, mud and grass and all, but she supposed at this point, it hardly mattered anyway. He pulled his knees up and locked his fingers together in a cage around them, like a boy might, but his eyes were hollow and his cheeks were sharp and the gun was lying on the grass next to him, and the interlaced fingers were smeared and splattered with bright and dark and blood blood blood red.

She reached out for the cigarette, and he passed it to her, and she took three long drags holding it in her hand with the broken bones, which was throbbing and sore, keeping the other pressed to her father's back where the bullet was, pressing the fabric that she had ripped off of her dress against the wound. She passed the smoke back to Tommy and he took it without speaking, finished it, then moved so that he was closer to her, legs stretched out in front of him, still not saying a word, sitting next to her beside her father's immobile body. Why he had wanted to do this, she had no idea. What he meant by it, she had no idea. She could feel his shoulder brushing hers, and the logical part of her brain was fighting the reins, screaming at her not to, but she turned and lifted her good hand to the back of his head against his buzzed hair and kissed him, hoping that Ada and Johnny were too far away or too preoccupied to notice, poured everything into it, all her fear, like she was a glass and he was the ocean, sweeping it away in the current, swallowing it whole, and his mouth was warm and slick and open and it felt like something she shouldn't be doing and that was why she did it, one of his hands in her hair and his lips sliding, pressing against hers, like he had come and sat by her just to taunt her, just to wait for her to crack and had gotten what he wanted when she did, and she pulled back because otherwise she was going to fuck him in front of his sister and an Irish Gypsy and her father was going to bleed out because she wasn't keeping pressure on his wound. Her body rebelled against her despite her best intentions to put distance between them, and she only managed to get about three inches away from his lips, had to focus on holding herself back, the taste and smell and feeling of him dizzying her and calling to her like a siren to some poor, lost sailor who knew the danger but couldn't stop himself from jumping overboard anyway.

"So what now?" She said, almost against his mouth, her tongue tasting slightly of mint and smoke.

"Hmm?" He said, his thumb brushing slowly against her cheek.

"Do we just sit here and wait to die?"

"What's the rest of life but sitting and waiting to die?" He asked, his deep voice an audible form of apathy, and she was jealous of him for it, for not feeling and suffering and existing so close to the surface like she did.

"And after? If we get away somehow?" She questioned, because she wanted to know, or she thought she did. He leaned back on his hands, away from her, putting the space between them that she couldn't manage to, and lit another cigarette.

"There is no 'after'", He told her, and she raised her eyebrows.

"There is no after." She repeated, to affirm it, her tone cold. He looked at her, and his expression was patronizing, and she hated it, like she was a child who was simply too young to understand the complicated ways of the world. "I thought you meant it," she said, trying not to sound accusatory, and failing, and realizing she was only solidifying his nonverbal argument regarding his opinion of her, which, in turn, only made her angrier. "You told me you meant it."

"I did mean it." He blew the smoke out, his jawline sharp enough to cut, his constant twists and turns like his smoke in the air and undecipherable moods even more so.

"And?" She prompted.

"And what?" He said, his words and accent rough.

"So there's no 'and' and there's no 'after' and there's nothing at all, is that it?" He rolled his head back. The sun was starting to peak out over the hills, bathing the horrors of the night in a pristine golden haze, lighting up his skin and his angles like he was God's favorite angel. His smoke wisped out between his lips.

"What did you expect, Tessa?" He said, and she shook her head, pressed her lips into a line, appalled. She shrugged, trying to repress everything that was welling up inside of her, trying not to let any of it leak out onto the surface.

"More than this," She told him, and he looked at her with his eyes like lightning strikes, full of pity or full of nothing, she couldn't tell, she could hardly ever tell what they held inside.

"You and everyone else," He replied, and she was silent because she couldn't even fucking speak, couldn't even look at him. They were silent for a few tense seconds, and then,

"If your father survives, remind him that he owes me a lot of money," Thomas said, and she whipped her head back around and locked eyes with him for a moment and he looked like he was making to stand up again but she slapped him, full across the face with her good hand, the other still pressing the ripped piece of her dress to her father's slowly rising and falling chest.

"Get the fuck away from me," she told him, and he stared back at her, and her hand stung like it had been plunged into a hornet's nest, and her heart felt like the same hornet's nest only tramped underfoot, only worse, and he looked like maybe he was going to say something, but in the distance there was the sound of an engine and a large, black van was flying down the dirt road to the farmhouse, and then he stood and walked away and didn't look back.


	34. Chapter 34

Arthur leapt out of the passenger's side of the van, black coat billowing, already shouting before Tommy was entirely in earshot.

"Tommy! We couldn't find her, Tom, we searched everywhere, brother, had all the coppers sweep the streets, even some houses, we don't know where she- bloody hell," he halted, once Tommy was in close enough proximity for Arthur to take in his appearance. "Tough night, eh? You alright?"

Tommy waved off his questions with a dismissive motion of his hand. "I'm fine. Ada's okay, Arthur, she's here, I found her. She's right there." He pointed to the hill, a quarter of a mile in the distance.

"Thank fucking Christ," Arthur said, his stiff shoulders relaxing, blowing out a deep breath, drawing a hand down his face.

"You have the men?"

"Yeah, yeah, they're all here, told them you said to come here at first light if we hadn't heard from you by then."

Tommy moved forward and clapped his brother on the shoulder, and pain shot through his arm, but he gripped on, his knees feeling like the joints had just disappeared and he almost buckled, his eyes burning. "It's good to see you, Arthur," he said, and Arthur pulled him into a gruff embrace that cracked against Tommy's broken ribs.

"You too, Tom. You gonna tell me about what the fuck happened here?"

Tommy wanted a cigarette. "No," he said.

"You get your girl?"

Tommy didn't correct him. "She's with Ada, and her father. You'll need to take him to the hospital, he's been shot. Send the boys into the forest. There's some hunting they need to do."

"How many?" Arthur asked, his mustache twitching agitatedly.

"I don't fucking know," Tommy said. "Just tell 'em to light up the trees."

"Yes, sir, Sergeant Major," Arthur said, giving him a brief salute, then walking towards the back of the black flatbed truck and _pound pound pounding _on the wooden ramp that served as the back door. "Alright, wake up, men, there's Germans need shot."

Gunshots cracked through the trees like falling branches, and Tommy sat on the low stone wall, cold underneath him, legs crossed, smoking. Arthur had taken Tessa and her father to the hospital, but Tommy had stayed, to make sure the job got done, to make sure he didn't have to look at her. His injuries would heal on their own, he could have Polly stitch up his arm later. For now, he sat, watching the sun make it's slow, lazy ascent over the tops of the trees, as his Blinders slowly emerged in the distance, dragging or carrying bodies back to the black van. The Jews never did show, but he had hardly expected them to. What he hadn't counted on was Ada's abduction, or the coincidental timing, or that they would bring her to the same location that they were keeping Reilly. It's not what he would have done, had he been the one stowing away hostages. He would keep them as separate and distant as possible, to lessen the chances of escape, to prevent any sense of comradery or hope for resistance. Like what had happened with Tessa and Ada. But he was grateful that he had checked, covered all his options, all the bases, grateful for the German's mistake. He thought about watching Tessa's red waves swing as she slit a man's throat for her father, thought of her breaking her own bones to escape her bonds to try to save Ada from the German officer's advances, thought of her lying for him and fighting for him, a stranger, in the hospital where they met. Because she was good, at her core, her willingness to suffer for others due not to how little she cared for herself, but instead how much she cared for them. _Your medals, _she had said. _You deserved them. _He laughed, harshly, to himself, and flicked his cigarette away. He was going to owe Johnny Dogs a whole new pack. He was going to owe him a lifetime supply, after last night. His head was clear and quiet and he hated it, but he was certain. Within less than two months of knowing him, Tessa had been shot at more times than he could count on both hands, and when he closed his eyes he saw the ring of bruises around her neck in the shape of hands, the blood dripping down her lip, the unnatural angle of her thumb, the fire in her eyes when she told him to get away from her. Tommy had taken whatever he wanted, after the war, because he had lost all reason not to, because life had never given him anything he hadn't had to grab with both hands. She was the only thing that meant more to him than his own selfishness, for the first time in longer than he could remember, and it terrified him, the thought of losing her, and the fact that it scared him scared him, the feedback loop screaming in his mind, a forigen, unfamiliar crescendo, until he put his head in his hands, and cried, alone on a broken wall of stone, the smoke from her burning car still trailing off gently into the air, smelling like melted metal and nitroglycerin and home.

Tessa sat by her father's bed in Ignatius hospital, trying and failing and then trying and failing all over again not to remember meeting Thomas, to not think about Thomas, to not remember anything or think about anything at all. Missy came into the room, her bushy brown eyebrows knitted together in concern, hands clasped in front of her like a nun carrying a rosary.

"What did they say?" Tessa asked her after only sparing her a brief glance, going back to watching her father, the pain that flickered across his face, even in sleep.

"They says…," she paused and pursed her lips, and Tessa already knew to prepare herself, "they says 'ee'll be lucky ta ever walk again, miss," the nurse told her, and Tessa nodded, blankly, because there was really nothing else she could really do. He was alive. He would survive. That would have to be enough. "They says if they had gotten to him sooner, maybe…"

The room was bathed in bright white light that made the bruises on Tessa's pale arms stand out even more garishly. She looked like she had had an accident in a dye shop. Missy waited for a moment for Tessa to say something, but she didn't, so she bowed her head a bit, and left. In the back of her mind, Tessa knew she should appreciate Missy's cautious attempts at a bedside manner, but it had never been her forte, really, and Tessa couldn't muster up the will to care much either way. Her father breathed unevenly. Tessa breathed unevenly, her throat still tight. She took his hand, slack against the bleached bedclothes.

"I brought you flowers," she told him, just in case he could hear her, just in case she could make up for things, even the tiniest bit. "You always used to get mom flowers, when we were little. But I think they were more for you than anything," she said, rubbing her thumb on his worn skin. Her other hand was wrapped in stiff, itchy bandages. "Mom never liked flowers all that much, but I did. When I missed you in America, I used to pick bunches of flowers from the side of the road. Weeds, mostly. Some wildflowers. I pretended you had sent them to me." She smiled, remembering, but tears were slipping off her cheeks. "I'm sorry, papa," she said, her voice catching, _sorry for everything, sorry this happened, sorry I didn't do enough, fast enough, well enough. Sorry sorry sorry. _The yellow roses she had gotten him glinted in their crystal vase like drops of sunlight come to life. The man she had bought them from on the street asked what colors she had wanted, and all she had said was, "Not red".

Eight days later, Tessa stood on Watery Lane, where she had told her driver to drop her off, trying to figure out what to do with her hands. There were three handsome cars parked out front of the houses, which didn't surprise her much. Whatever else could be said about the Shelby family, they stuck together in times of trouble. She was glad that they were still here, by Ada's side, but she was not glad that one of the cars was Tommy's black Bugatti, next to a classy grey Aston she assumed was Polly's, and another, larger black vehicle she couldn't tell the make of, that was probably Arthur or John's. She had been hoping that Tommy, at least, had gone back to his house, wherever that really was, or that he would be so busy with whatever business he had been neglecting over the past several months that she would not have to see him. She was not ready to see him. Her blue-green dress tossed itself around her ankles a bit in the ashy wind. She had taken a leaf from Tommy's book and worn one that matched her eyes. Dirty children yelped and squalked around her like birds in flight, flitting to one side of the narrow street, and then to the other. Dirty men heaved loads of coal on their shoulders, slightly less dirty women hung up their washing to dry in the smoke-filled breeze. The three cars stood, imposing, like sentries in front of a castle. Tessa squared her shoulders, took a breath, and crossed the street.

"Polly! Going to the Garrison! Tell Arthur and the boys to meet me there!" Tommy called over his shoulder, up the stairs, his voice bouncing off the worn walls. He shrugged on his coat with one hand and reached for the door with the other, but someone knocked on it as he did so, the _tap tap tap _cut off as he swung it open, and then, suddenly, there she was, looking slightly surprised but not half as surprised as he felt, her hand still lifted.

"Tessa," he said, keeping his voice neutral.

"Thomas," she nodded, her waves cascading around her shoulders, her pink lips parted. She looked like a porcelain doll and her perfume smelled like apples and sunlight as it wafted over him and if he was a lesser man, he would have taken a step back, or maybe forward, but he was not and did not, kept watching her, appraising her, taking in the details. Her dress was the same color as her eyes. There had been a time when she would have become uncomfortable under his gaze, would have avoided his stare, averted her eyes, but this was not that time. She raised her eyebrows.

"May I come in?"

"By all means," he said, finally, stepping back into the house to let her pass, pulling a cigarette out of his jacket, noticing that she took care not to brush him as she entered.

"Is Ada here?" She asked, and he had missed her oddly musical voice. Her hand was bandaged, and the ring of bruises around her throat had developed yellow tinges that matched the bright ring around the center of her eyes, but Tommy said nothing about any of that, wishing he hadn't noticed in the first place, wanting to get as far away from her as quickly as he could and wanting to move closer to her all at once. He just nodded and lit his smoke.

"Upstairs," he said.

"Good," she said, glancing at him, and something flashed across her face, too quickly for him to catch it, her brow crinkling, before it was gone and her expression smoothed out like the ripples of a lake after a pebble had disturbed it. Her skin looked soft and smooth and he wanted to remember what she tasted like and he cleared his throat, loudly, to snap himself out of his own thoughts. He wondered if, when she looked at his hands, she still saw blood dripping off of them.

"I was just leaving," he said, and her face was carefully closed.

"Of course," her tone was gracious, respectful, completely distant. "I'll not keep you." She looked like she was holding herself back from saying something else, some ingenuine platitude, perhaps _it was nice seeing you _or _talk to you soon _or maybe _I fucking hate you, Thomas Shelby, _and they stood with their gazes locked for another moment, the world silent around them, dust in the air lit up by the light streaming in through the open door. Then Tommy put his cigarette in his mouth and left, intentionally moving into her space as he did so, brushing past her on his way out onto the street, to see if her breathing hitched. It didn't. He took a deep pull of smoke as he walked, and briefly closed his eyes against the grey sky.

Tessa found Polly in the living room, reading the paper and smoking a clove. Her smart eyes snapped up to Tessa's face when she entered, flickering over her neck, down to her hand, then back up to her face. She tsked.

"Look what they did to you," she said, but her tone was missing the simpering sympathy most people had been addressing Tessa with recently, and she was eternally grateful for it. Tessa sat down across from her with a sigh, waving her bandaged hand.

"I'm fine. It's better than a bullet to the head."

Polly dipped her cigarette in acquiescence. "How's your father?"

"Still in hospital, recovering. They're saying he'll be able to come home in a few weeks, but they're not sure how long exactly."

"Good," said Polly, and Tessa wondered if it was, if her father would rather have died than never walk again, and Polly said, "I don't have to tell you that this is what happens when you get involved with men like Thomas Shelby."

Tessa held back another sigh. "No, you don't have to tell me that. Although admittedly, this is more what happens when you get involved with a German mafia." And then she wished she could take it back, because it sounded like she was defending him, and Polly's dark, dark brown eyes were gazing at her.

"How is Ada?" Tessa asked, partially because she wanted to divert the conversation, but mostly because that was what she was there for in the first place.

It was Polly's turn to sigh, smoke blowing out from her lips held in the shape of an O, a swift and efficient stream. "She doesn't talk. Won't tell any of us what happened, but that tells us enough."

Tessa nodded, pressing her fingers against her temple. She had a headache coming on, and pulled a cigarette case out of her coat pocket. "One of the German officers took her when we were at the house."

Polly was silent for a moment, eyes blank, staring out of a dirty window, then asked, "Did he get his justice?" in a flat voice.

"Yes," Tessa said. "Ada gave it to him. Put her heel through his eye." She smiled a little bit, and wondered when she had become the kind of person who smiled at something like that. She lit her cigarette.

"Tommy said you took matters into your own hands, as well," Polly said, looking at her in that penetrating way. In another life, Tessa thought Polly would make a good school teacher, gifted with the ability to draw out confessions of ill behavior from unruly students.

"Tommy's been talking about me?" She asked, fighting to keep her voice ambivalent, but it didn't matter. She knew Polly knew anyway. She read people like she did tea leaves.

"Said you slit a man's throat."

Tessa hummed quietly around her smoke, looking at the faded pattern of the wallpaper, the pictures and various decorations that adorned the walls. Polly waited for her, propting elaboration through her silence, but all Tessa said was,

"Do you know where his keys are?"


	35. Chapter 35

Tessa drove, and Ada sat silently, her hands knitted in her lap, her pale fingers intertwined. They pulled into Charlie Strong's yard, the grey landscape meshing against the grey sky, distant plumes of smoke billowing, intermingling in the air with the sounds of steel and labor and sweat. Curly rushed up once they passed the gate, recognizing the car and expecting Tommy, his kind face puzzled when it was Tessa who stepped out of the vehicle, her heels crunching on the gravel.

"Hullo, Miss Tessa," he said, his gaze curious. "Did you- did you bring your lovely stallion today?"

"Not today, Curly, I'm sorry. He's at my father's stables, though, and you're welcome to visit him whenever you'd like." Curly's face brightened at that.

"Is Charlie around?" She asked. He shook his head.

"Charlie went to the Garrison, Miss Tessa, told me to stay here and keep watch."

Tommy had gone to the Garrison as well. So he was planning something. It was no longer her place to know what. She sucked a breath in through her teeth.

"Curly, do you think you could fetch something for me?"

Tessa kept driving, glancing over at Ada occasionally, but Ada never returned her stare, her large blue eyes scanning the scenery, flickering back and forth, gazing out of the window, lost in her own head. She didn't ask where they were going and Tessa didn't try to get her to speak, just watched her reaction to ensure that she wasn't making a horrible mistake. If Ada recognized the landscape, she said nothing of it, did not react to it, her stylishly cut brown waves, several shades lighter than her brother's, jostled slightly by the movement of the car. The drive felt longer this time around, perhaps because Tessa wasn't half mad with terror, tied up or clutching the hand of her dying father, but there was still a clenching tension in her stomach she was finding difficult to ignore. Eventually, they came upon familiar, sloping hills, scattered trees that became a sparse forest, a dirt road leading to a huge, abandoned house. Tessa stopped Tommy's car, taking in the scene, fighting with the vicious flashbacks playing behind her eyes. Beside her, Ada sat like a statue, barely even breathing, but Tessa thought she was probably doing the same thing in her mind, trying to push down the images and flashes and moments that somehow felt like they were still happening. Sometimes it felt like they were always happening, over and over again, like everything that happened since then was a dream and she would wake up at any moment alone in an abandoned bedroom, with her hands tied in front of her, restrained to a chair. Tessa opened the car door, got out, and went around to the back of the to the trunk, took something out and set it on the ground. Ada stayed frozen until Tessa returned to the passenger side and opened the door for her, holding out her empty, broken hand. The air was cold and made her thumb ache.

"Come on, Addie," she said, and Ada hesitated but then took her hand gently, clambered down, looking like a doe, innocent and beautiful, and it was incredibly difficult verging on impossible to imagine the same girl stomping a man's skull to shatters.

They walked to the house slowly, taking in the broken shutters, the open front door, creaking on its rusty hinges in the breeze. Tessa went in first, feeling like she was intentionally walking back into a nightmare, suddenly unsure, suddenly petrified. Her throat felt tight again, like she was being choked by the hands of a ghost. The dust in the entryway had been disturbed by footprints, boots and expensive shoes and one pair of three inch heels and one pair of bare feet. Imprinted there, like the imprint of a departed soul. Tessa moved into the house, and Ada stayed outside, just beyond the front door, watching Tessa disappear. She walked into the kitchen, past the parlor, past the smears of her father's blood painting the narrow hallway, dried a dark brown, ran her hands over the bullet-ridden table, still laid sideways on the floor, the cabinet that had been the only thing standing between her and death. That, and Tommy. There were empty shells on the floor like a paradigm of the sea shore, metal glinting like pearls in clams. She turned and walked back through the kitchen, down the hall, to the top of the stairs. She hesitated for a moment, feeling the same thing when she had attended her mother's funeral, her brother's, her grandfather's, a feeling so huge it felt unapproachable, a feeling she couldn't even begin to feel. She walked down the stairs.

At the bottom, and then past the door to the cell, there was a spray of blood against a wall, partially blocked by where her father had been, and then, only a few feet away, another, this one splattered. She looked at the violent art, the story it told, more of it on the floor, and wondered at the amount of red fluid the human body contained, considered, ever so briefly, watching it seep out of her own wrists, just to see how much there really was. The air smelled of it, like it was coming out of the very walls, like the house itself was bleeding. She walked back out of the cell, up the stairs, back to where Ada stood, in the same spot where Tessa had left her, staring at the house.

"Do you want to come in?" Tessa asked her, and Ada stood completely still, for five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. Then she nodded, very slightly, her small face white, her chin set.

"Come on," Tessa said, softly, reaching out her good hand. Ada took it, gripping onto Tessa so tightly she thought she might break her other thumb, but Tessa didn't mind. They walked slowly up the stairs, Ada's breath shuddering, down the hallway, stopping at the dark round stain on the floor next to the door that held the broken bed. Ada stared at it, like she thought it was going to move, or disappear, or do something, but she wasn't sure what. It didn't. Tessa wondered how long she should stand, silently, and let the scene replay in Ada's mind, if it was healthy for her to be picturing it for this long, reliving it, but then Ada reached out and opened the door to the bedroom, stepping inside before Tessa could decide if she should try to stop her. Tessa hesitated outside of the door, trying to imagine how she would feel if she were in Ada's position, if she would want to be alone, and failing, grasping desperately at her uselessness. Eventually, she decided it would be better for her to be there and Ada to not want her to be, than for her to not be there when Ada might need her, so she followed the other girl into the room.

When she entered, Ada was kneeling on the center of the dusty floor, facing the broken four poster bed, her arms wrapped around herself. Tessa had to bite her still-healing lip to stop the tears from springing into her eyes. The side of Ada's face that she could see, and the expression on it, the lost, lost expression, hurt worse than her thumb, worse than her neck, hurt like seeing her brother's pale face in his casket, hurt like putting flowers on her own mother's grave. Tessa settled on her knees next to her, and for a moment, it looked like the two women were praying at the foot of the bed together, but if God saw them or heard them, he said nothing in reply. And then Ada's face cracked and scrunched and she let out a hollow, choking sob, and then another, and crumpled into Tessa's arms like a body hit by a bullet, and Tessa held onto her and rocked her and stroked her lavender-scented hair, her tears falling down onto Ada's mahogany waves.

Ada's cries slowed, then stopped, her shaking shoulders coming to a gasping rest. A tear dripped off of her nose as she pulled away, and she swiped at it, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and smearing her makeup. Tessa tried to put on a brave face, for the both of them, like she didn't have tear tracks down her cheeks as well, like being back in this house with Ada didn't make her blood run cold, didn't make her want to hide herself away from the world until she no longer belonged to it. They stood and left the room, neither speaking, and walked down the stairs like they were completing some ancient, wordless ritual. When they got back to the car, Tessa picked up the two silver cans she had gotten from Curly, unscrewed the tops. The air smelled like fumes and open, grey sky and past-but-still-present terror. Ada watched her go back into the house, was still watching the doorway a few minutes later when she reappeared, her cans nearly empty, petrol splattered on her pretty dress. Tessa trailed a line of liquid out to where Ada was standing, the black car gleaming faintly behind her, then threw the cans back at the house as hard as she could, and they bounced off the shattered windows, landed at the run-down entrance. Tessa pulled out a book of matches, and handed them to Ada, who took them with freezing but steady hands and met Tessa's eyes and said, "Thank you," so quietly Tessa almost didn't hear her even though they were right next to each other, and then she took a match and lit it, the light from the little, bright flame illuminating her face for a moment, catching and dancing in her eyes, and then she dropped it onto the dirt at her feet, at the dark, wet line that led back to the house, and they stood side by side as the farmhouse went up in smoke.


End file.
